


Great Romances Of The 21st Century

by rilla



Category: Fashion Model RPF, One Direction (Band), Zayn Malik (Musician)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 13:53:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5588473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rilla/pseuds/rilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's December 2015. When Gigi and Kendall engineer Zayn and Harry's first meeting in nine months, they get a little more than they bargained for.</p><p>'“So what’s our aim here, anyway, with this whole meeting for dinner thing?” Gigi asks, popping a couple of grapes off their stems.<br/>“For Zayn and Harry to be friends again,” Kendall says, wide-eyed and sweet and sincere. “For them to be happy.”<br/>'For Zayn to get another chance to blow Harry Styles,'  Gigi accidentally thinks. The image of it in her head is so delicious that she has to shift a little on her kitchen stool. “Absolutely,” she lies. “For them to be happy.”'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Great Romances Of The 21st Century

**Author's Note:**

> Title and quotation taken from a Taking Back Sunday song. This is a little more Christmassy than I'd like it to be considering I'm posting it a couple of days after Christmas, but these things happen. Thank you so much to Anna for reading most of this for me and encouraging me, to Grace for reading it and being delightful about it and to many people for encouraging me to finish it! I started writing it before Gigi visited Zayn in the UK, so the timeline is very off, whoops.

_if it's not keeping you up nights, then what's the point?_

*

“So, like, the Zayn thing,” Kendall says, when they’re halfway through their third episode of _The Great British Bake Off._ They paused it to grab some ice cream from Kendall’s freezer. She always has the good shit, full fat, because it’s physically impossible for her to gain weight, so she has a lot of great food in her apartment. On her countertop there’s a row of full cookie jars, all of the cookies stacked up in some funky geometric patterns that look like they took hours to do. “Khloe did that,” Kendall told her, the first time Gigi went over to hang out. “She’s totally OCD,” which, okay, Gigi isn’t sure that cookie stacking is actually a symptom of a legit mental illness, but she decided to let Kendall have that one.

“What about Zayn?” she asks, scooping ice cream into her bowl, one perfect curl of it and then another. It looks like a lot, when it’s in the bowl. She chops one of the curls in half with Kendall’s ice cream scoop and puts it back in the tub. Kendall rolls her eyes and starts shaking sprinkles everywhere. “Get those fucking additives out of my face,” Gigi tells her. “No food is naturally that blue.”

“Blueberries,” Kendall points out, her head tipped to one side, and looks thoughtful as she licks ice cream off her thumb. “And, um… my mom’s chef once made us eat these, uh, these blue potatoes? It was gross. I was like, no, I don’t think so. I got a burger instead.”

“I feel like blueberries are actually purple,” Gigi tells her. She wets her fingertip and starts picking up sprinkles from the counter. They burst like sugar sweet snowdrops on her tongue.

“They’re blue. Otherwise why would they be called blueberries?” Kendall looks like she’s losing interest as she wanders back into her living room and sprawls over her end of the couch. “Are you trying to distract me?”

“No,” Gigi says, which is only seventy-five percent true. “What did you want to know?”

“I don’t even know,” Kendall says. “Is it serious?”

“Um, I don’t know.” That really is true. She puts her ice cream bowl down on Kendall’s coffee table and makes sure that her pillows are fluffed up before she sits down again. “I mean, he’s cute.”

“I guess he is,” Kendall agrees, sounding lukewarm.

“You don’t think so?” Gigi watches her carefully.

“I mean, I don’t really know? People are always like, ‘Oh, he’s cute’ about whatever guy and I’m always like, ‘I don’t really see it’. I don’t know. I never see any guys that I think are cute.”

There’s a word for that, but Gigi’s not going to say it aloud. She points at Kendall’s TV screen, where there’s an Indian guy with dark curly hair making fig, cheese and walnut bread. Gigi would eat the fuck out of that, and then her mom would kill her. “He’s cute,” she says.

“Yeah.” Kendall frowns at the screen. “Sure. He’s cute. You like Indian guys?”

“Zayn isn’t from India.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I have a type,” Gigi says. Cody was blond. Joe was – Joe still is a mess. Zayn is different from both of them, although she hasn’t figured out how yet.

“Where is Zayn from?” Kendall asks.

“Bradford.” Gigi knows that, at least. He’s from Bradford, which is in the north of England. She’s never been there. _I don’t think you’d like it,_ Zayn had said to her when she’d asked about it, and laughed. She still isn’t sure what she should think about that, and if she should be insulted or not.

“Oh. Is that near London?” Kendall flips her hair over one shoulder.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” Gigi says.

“You should totally know that, now you’re his girlfriend.”

Gigi raises an eyebrow at her. Kendall’s eyes are sparkling and her mouth’s tilted up at the corner in that way she always gets when she’s teasing. “Shut up,” she says. Her ice cream’s starting to melt. She mashes her spoon into it. “Where was Harry from?”

“God, I don’t even remember. Like… Manchester, maybe? Around there. Not near London.” Kendall frowns at the cute Indian doctor baker guy on TV. “Did he put cheese in his bread? That looks gross.”

“You think everything looks gross,” Gigi says.

“That’s because everything is gross,” Kendall points out. “Except for ice cream.” She licks her spoon and lets out an exaggeratedly happy sigh. “So you guys aren’t official.”

“I don’t even know if I want to be. Like, he’s cute, and he’s sweet, and he’s…” She wants to talk about the way he fucks her well, slow and smooth, what his head looks like between her legs, his glistening mouth when he pops back up again. His slow smile that makes her want him badly. But Kendall always gets weird about that stuff, like when Gigi told her that Cody was super entitled and bratty about going down on her, and that Joe took literally four years to come every single time they did it. She wants to be like _Zayn told me that he likes a finger up his butt and I don’t know if I need to cut my nails first_ , but she has the feeling that Kendall might scream and throw her ice cream bowl at Gigi’s face if she says that. “I don’t know,” she says instead. “He’s kind of hard work. I feel like he doesn’t really have anyone out here so if you want to hang out with him he’s always like ‘Yes! I haven’t spoken to another human being in three weeks!’ and totally seizes onto you and it’s a little like, okay, dude, just chill out.”

“Harry was totally not like that at all,” Kendall says thoughtfully, winding her hair around her finger. “He was the opposite of clingy, but not in a bad way, you know? He was the kind of person where you could leave him alone for a while and you’d know that he was totally okay. Like, one time when we were skiing he hurt his ankle and decided to sit out an afternoon so he just sat in this café for the whole time drinking, like, eight hot chocolates, and made friends with these old people, an old man and an old woman. And they didn’t even know who he was so when we got back they were like ‘Your boyfriend is the sweetest young man!’ to me.” She laughs. “I think my mom was looking around like, ‘Where are the fucking cameras? You gotta film this!’ But, I mean, he didn’t even want to be on the show, which was cool.”

“Did you really like him?” Gigi asks. The idea of Kendall really liking someone is pretty weird. It makes her stomach do odd things, probably because she isn’t used to it. For a while now Kendall has been pretty much hers, since their sisters both started dating douchebags and being around a lot less. They get each other. They both get accused of getting all their jobs because their parents have money – which, okay, it helps – and they both have moms who can be total assholes sometimes, and their families have both recently gone through some shit. Gigi’s mom and stepdad are splitting up, and everyone has fucking Lyme disease, and Kendall’s parents just broke up last year, and her dad’s Caitlyn now, which is totally fine and Caitlyn is definitely hot, but it’s still kind of a big change. Plus, people in their industry can be jerks sometimes, especially to Kendall, so it’s important that they stick together. That was something Taylor told them too, before telling Lily to ‘look after’ them at the Victoria’s Secret show, like she was some kind of guardian angel in a billion dollar bra that not even Gigi or Kendall’s moms would buy. 

“I don’t know,” Kendall says. She’s blank and thoughtful but somehow she still looks pretty, even like that. “He’s a nice guy. He called me when my dad announced she was transitioning. He was really sweet about it. And we could talk. I felt like he listened to me. He looks at you and you just let stuff spill out, stuff that you would never usually say to people. It’s weird.”

“Zayn actually said something like that too,” Gigi says. She asked him last week, _So do you miss them? It must be weird. You were so close, right?_ and he’d made all these annoying mumbly noises before finally nodding and agreeing. They’d been mates. He hoped they’d be mates again. He and Liam were talking and he and Niall had texted— _Niall’s so sweet_ , Gigi had said, which she knows because Selena has a crush on him, and he’d nodded. Niall’s as sweet as Selena thinks he is, apparently, which is weird because she’s so totally wrong about Justin so Gigi kind of assumed she had horrible taste in general. Louis is still mad, and apparently Zayn’s mad he’s mad, and Louis is mad that Zayn’s mad that he’s mad, because boys are both dumb and complicated in their dumbness. _What about Harry?_ Gigi had asked finally, and there had been a pause, before finally Zayn had shrugged and said, more wistfully, _Yeah. I miss him a lot. He’s…_ And Gigi had given him space to think and then to talk, because she hasn’t known Zayn for long but she’s known him for long enough to figure out that he needs that space or he winds up not saying anything at all. _I liked talking to him,_ Zayn had said eventually. _At night. We used to go in each other’s hotel rooms and just – we’d talk, you know? Maybe not towards the end as much. But he’s good to talk to._

Kendall just nods, preoccupied as she scrapes her spoon around the bottom of her bowl for the last remnants of melted ice cream. “Yeah. I mean, they were close.”

“I got the impression he was closer to Louis.”

“Who, Harry?” Kendall makes an incredulous face. “I mean, maybe now, if stuff has changed between them all...”

“No. Zayn.”

“I guess. Maybe lately. I don’t really know. Last year they were like… when we first got to know each other, Zayn had just gotten engaged, and Harry thought it was the dumbest thing.” Kendall shakes her head a little, but Gigi kind of agrees. She talked to Zayn about that a little. It feels weird to be dating someone who actually wanted to get married when he was twenty, even though Zayn explained to her that he didn’t really want to get married. He’d wanted something at home, something steady, something real to come back to. _That doesn’t sound like a great reason to ask a girl to marry you_ , Gigi had pointed out, and Zayn’s mouth had flattened into an unhappy line, which definitely means he agreed with her. Kendall sighs a little and leans forward to put her bowl down on the coffee table. “And I guess he’d told Zayn that at some point and they’d had a fight? I don’t know. I feel like things had changed between them. He seemed kind of sad about that.”

“Yeah.” Zayn had seemed sad, too, like there was something weird in his eyes when he’d talked about Harry. Like there was something that was definitively over in the way that it wasn’t with the other boys, even Louis. Gigi can’t imagine cutting all her ties like that and she thinks she’d probably rather die than live by herself in a whole other country away from all her siblings and her mom and her friends, but she gets the feeling Zayn’s a fan of throwing a lit match over his shoulder and walking out of burning buildings without looking back. She supposes she has that to look forward to one day when he decides to leave her behind too. “But I kind of get that, you know? If you suddenly got engaged I’d be like, ‘What are you doing? You’re so young’.”

“I’m not going to get engaged, though,” Kendall says. “Maybe not ever.”

“Never?” Gigi raises her eyebrows. Getting married isn’t her life aim or anything, because this isn’t the 1950s and she’s a modern woman and a kickass feminist, but she always kind of imagined it for herself one day. She’s had dreams about a pretty house, with a nice guy, and some cute kids, and a girl who looks a lot like her standing at the front door and being a good mom and wife and maybe an entrepreneur as well. Maybe she’ll have her own lingerie line by then, or stockings, or a lifestyle brand, more like Jessica Alba than Gwyneth Paltrow, because Gwyneth is terrible. A website where she can tell people to do what they love and fuck the rest. She thinks that Zayn for one would be totally into a site like that. She can’t picture him standing next to her in her bright white mansion though, grumbling from room to room and smoking too near the front doors.

“I just can’t see it happening,” Kendall says. “My sister Kylie, she told me she wants to marry her boyfriend.”

Gigi winces. “Really?”

“Really. I know. And Tyga is an idiot,” Kendall says. “He’s totally broke. Did you know he’s pretty much living off Kylie now? I’m like, ‘Great job doing that lip line. I’m sure Tyga’s gonna totally appreciate it when you give him half the money from it and he uses it to bedazzle his Range Rover with Swarovski crystals’. If she marries him I’m literally going to murder her.”

“Literally?”

“One hundred percent literally.” Kendall’s smiling now, a little. “I’m gonna put her in the bedazzled Range Rover and roll her off a cliff.”

“That’s fair,” Gigi says. Sometimes she doesn’t like Abel either. He started talking to Bella when she was too young, in Gigi’s opinion, not even legal, young enough that he could push his way into her heart and stay there for longer than maybe he should. Her mom didn’t mind, though, which was irritating. She thinks Kendall’s mom might be kind of the same way, and they both have similarly distracted dads with shit of their own going on. A lot of the time, they both just have each other these days. Kendall has a billion brothers and sisters but they all have all this shit to deal with already, babies and break-ups and drugs and whatever, and they both have Taylor and their friends, but then the whole Calvin thing started, and Taylor got a little less interested in having her girl squad around her. Whatever. Gigi doesn’t care. Taylor can be an annoying control freak and Calvin is a dick, and she has Kendall, and her bowl of half-melted ice cream. In their families, they’re both the ones with their shit together, and she wants it to stay that way.

She leans across the couch and pokes Kendall’s thigh with her toes. “Hey. Let’s watch more of this TV show. I want to know if the cute guy wins.”

“There’s, like, a lot of it to go. I hope you know that.” Kendall’s smiling now, a little.

“Sure. I’m good with that. Let’s stay up all night.”

“Let’s go crazy, crazy, crazy till we see the sun,” Kendall sings, and fist pumps. “You know, Harry was the one who told me I should watch this show? He really likes it.”

“Really?” Gigi feels a little pang. She can’t imagine Zayn watching a pleasant TV show about average-looking people talking about scones. There aren’t any super heroes at all, and no one seems to be cursing or walking in the rain or having realisations about the dark world in which they live, or any of the other stuff he’s usually into when he isn’t talking about minions and Ghostbusters and Olaf.

“Sure.” Kendall rearranges herself and throws herself down so her head’s in Gigi’s lap. “It always makes me feel good. Do you mind if we sit like this?”

The weight of her head is warm and weirdly reassuring, and her hair is slippery silky on Gigi’s bare legs. “Sure,” she says, and tangles her hand gently in her hair. Kendall smiles up at her, dreamy and sweet. “You can do whatever you want with me,” Gigi tells her quietly. “You know that.”

*

They watch all of the baking TV show through the night – the cute guy doesn’t win, but Gigi’s okay with that because the woman who wins is maybe the most awesome lady in the whole world – so she’s kind of tired when she goes over to Zayn’s house the next day. He shows her his graffiti room for the millionth time, which is okay, she guesses. A lot of the stuff on the wall looks kind of like a mess, and it smells strongly of spray paint. She feels like there’s something different in there from the last time she was there but she can’t tell what it is when he makes her guess. “The dog?” she tries. For some reason its butthole is visible. She feels like she’d remember that from before, although maybe she just blocked it out from horror. “The stars?” They’re pretty, actually. She likes the stars.

“No,” Zayn says, sounding a little disappointed, which is dumb because Gigi has more to think about in her life than the exact contents of his stupid graffiti room. The fumes are giving her a headache. “It’s—”

“Oh, is it the butterfly?” It’s actually a pretty ugly butterfly, but she isn’t going to say that aloud. 

“Yeah!” He looks happy at that, which is cute. He’s cute a lot of the time but he always screws his nose up and protests when she points it out. That just makes him even cuter. “Do you like it?”

“I like it a lot.” She mimics his accent, because she can be just as cute as him when she wants to be.

“Was that you trying to be a Yorkshire lass?” he asks, a smile starting to curl on his lips.

“Sure. Did I do good?” She tilts her head to one side.

“Thought I was at home for a moment. It was nice.” He puts his arms around her waist, which feels good, and starts kissing her neck, which feels even better. His beard’s a delicious combination of soft and scratchy and his mouth’s sending little jolts down to her groin. She curls her hand into his hair, which is soft and a little tufty from all the bleach he’s been using lately, and thinks for a moment of her fingers in Kendall’s hair on her couch and the warmth of Kendall on top of her for that episode, leaning against her shoulder for the next episode, behind her for the one after that, hands in Gigi’s hair as she braided it carefully before twisting it into knots onto the top of her head. Detangling it again afterwards. Gigi remembers shifting a little uncomfortably as Kendall combed her fingers carefully through her hair; the warmth of her breath on the back of her neck and the gentleness of her hands had been something, somehow, making her feel like part of her insides was trembling. 

“Kendall and I watched this TV show, _The Great British Bake Off_ ” she says.

“Yeah? My mum likes that.” He manages to grope her butt and talk about his mom in the same moment, which she respects. She likes a guy with diligence and a can-do attitude.

“Yeah. Apparently Harry told her to watch it.”

Zayn’s still for a moment. His hands are still on her ass but they aren’t moving any more. “My Harry?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “Harry Potter.”

“Shut up.”

“Prince Harry. The ginger guy. He’s cute.”

“I’ll dye my hair for you. I’ll become a ginger if that’s what you want,” he promises recklessly.

“You’re so dumb. Yes, your Harry,” she says. Zayn pulls back, arms around her waist now, a little more chaste than two seconds ago. His face this close to hers is hypnotic, the power of his bottom lip, the straightness of his nose, the size of his anime-huge eyes. Her mom would probably sacrifice at least twenty random human beings for Gigi’s lashes to grow as long and thick as Zayn’s. Maybelline would lose their shit over it. “You don’t talk to him now, right?”

“No.” He glances over her shoulder. “Just Liam.”

“Kendall said Harry’s nice.”

“He is nice,” Zayn says. His voice is doing that thing it always does when he gets irritable, turning all low and slurry. “That’s probably why he wasn’t on my side.”

“Of course he wasn’t on your side,” Gigi points out. “You just walked out on a million date tour.”

Zayn rolls his eyes and presses his lips together in that way he has that means ‘You’d have to murder me to get me to talk more’. If he’s not careful, Gigi’s going to do just that. Honestly, sometimes she feels like his ex-fiancée had a lucky escape. She likes Zayn a lot, but four years with the guy? Perrie was made of stronger stuff than her. He’s cute and he’s nice most of the time, but the idea of this whole relationship being anything to do with ‘forever’ is way too much for her. She wants a guy who’ll communicate more and who’ll show up when he says he will. She wants a guy who doesn’t like his dog more than he likes her. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

“I know you had your reasons, baby,” she tells him, mostly so they can have awesome sex sometime soon instead of getting all teenage angsty the way he sometimes does, and he sighs at her. “I just think it’s kind of sad,” she continues. “To know people for so long and then to have no relationship at all, you know? Friendship breakups hurt – I mean, more so for me than breaking up with boyfriends, because with boyfriends it’s like, ‘Okay, you get your heart broken a few times before you find the one, so whatever’, but with friends it’s like – it feels wrong. It’s like, this wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“I don’t know if you’re trying to make me feel bad or what,” he says, his voice clipped and staccato. “Too many people have tried to make me feel bad about this and—”

Okay, now she feels like shit. His eyes are even bigger than usual and there’s something desperate and empty in them, and he’s letting go of her, taking a couple steps away. “I’m still mates with Liam,” he points out, sharp and jerky. “And the others, that’s their fucking choice as well, that’s…” 

He trails off. She says quietly, feeling herself hurting for him and his loneliness that she knows he won’t ever discuss, “Didn’t they try to contact you after you went?”

He swallows. She sees his Adam’s apple move, hears the slick of spit. “Actually,” he admits, “they did.”

“So you didn’t…”

“I didn’t pick up the phone. Or reply to texts, or to emails or whatever.” He pushes his hands into his pockets defensively, his eyes on the floor. She feels like maybe she should feel mad at him on behalf of his old bandmates. His old friends, right? They were friends. She thinks they were friends, anyway. She hopes so. She wouldn’t be able to survive work without friends like Kendall and Lily and Cara and she figures that maybe he felt the same way for a while. “I know that makes me an asshole,” he says savagely. “I know. People have _said_ …”

“I didn’t say,” she points out. “I’m not saying. I’m on your side, always.”

He’s quiet for a moment and then he says, “Thank you.”

She nods, and turns away. His stupid graffiti room actually isn’t that ugly. The butterfly isn’t that hideous. All it needs is a little colour, a little brightness, a little joy. She sits down on the plastic sheeted floor, cross legged. “Draw me like one of your French girls,” she says.

“What?” he asks, because he’s a stupid boy who doesn’t understand her amazing _Titanic_ references.

“Draw me on your wall. If you get mad at me you can always paint over me or turn me into Medusa or something, I don’t care.”

He assembles his cans of paint. Gold-capped, red-capped, black-capped, blue-capped. The outlines of her face that he creates, they’re kind of sketchy, kind of not all there, but they’re accurate anyway, although she doesn’t know how he manages it. The clarity of the arch of her eyebrows, maybe, and the line of her nose, and the crimson of her top lip. He paints her hair in tumbling golden corkscrews like she’s a princess, and when he turns to look at her, eyeing her thoughtfully like an artist instead of a boyfriend, she feels for a moment like that’s exactly what she is.

*

Later that evening they light a fire. More accurately, she lights a fire, because he sucks at it. He hovers behind her holding his lighter helpfully and failing to be useful. He eats cold pizza from his fridge and she eats some of the quinoa salad his assistant started ordering for her for dinner, because she has a shoot in two days and her life is boring as hell. “Kendall and I ate ice cream last night. Real ice cream,” she tells him afterwards, sprawling out on his lap. She feels like it should be super adorable and romantic as fuck to do this, but she can see his nose hairs. She wonders if Kendall could see hers last night. She feels like visible nose hair would be the sort of thing that her mom would flip out at her for. “It was pretty wild,” she adds.

“Shit, babe. Rock the fuck on,” he tells her, and gets one of his rings caught in a knot when he tries to run his fingers through her hair. “Fuck. Sorry.” 

“Fuhck. Sorreh,” she says, in his accent, and he rolls his eyes at her as he detangles himself. “I don’t understand why you’re looking at me like I’m not the cutest thing you ever saw,” she says. “We should watch another season of the Bake Off.”

“Which one did you watch?”

“The one with Tamal and Nadiya. Tamal’s cute.”

“Tamal’s gay,” he tells her. “My sister texted me to tell me. She was devastated.”

“ _I’m_ devastated,” she says, although if she’s honest she never really thought she was going to marry a British baker-slash-anaesthetist, so it doesn’t affect her life too much. 

“Sorry to hear that. I’ll start to learn to make pies for you to replace him in your heart.”

“I make a mean pie.”

“You make American pies,” he says.

“What’s wrong with American pies?”

“Nothing, except that they’re American.”

“I wish that one day you would start making sense,” she says. “Just for me. If you started making sense I’d do that butt thing you like.”

“Which butt thing?”

“All of them at the same time.”

“That sounds flexible. Do you do yoga?”

“Actually, yes.”

“You should put your legs behind your head.”

She tries, except then she winds up mostly almost falling off his couch as he laughs helplessly at her and doesn’t try to catch her, because he’s a jerk. “I almost hit my head on your coffee table,” she announces as she picks herself back up. “I could have died.”

She’s brushing her hair back into place and rearranging her shirt when she realises he’s looking at her kind of strangely. “What?” she says. “Are my tits out? Do you want them to be?”

He shakes his head a little, which is rude. “No, I just…” he begins, and then falls quiet, which means he’s too busy having deep thoughts about things to consider her tits. That’s insulting. “You just reminded me of someone for a moment then. That’s all.”

“Who?” she says, adjusting her bra strap and starting to gather her hair into a bun on the top of her head. “It better not be your mom. That isn’t hot at all.”

“No one,” he says, and makes his super irritating ‘I’m Zayn and I’m a lost soul’ face. “It doesn’t matter. It’s gone now.”

“Right.” She eyes him. “Okay, you freak.”

“Perrie used to call me that,” he says. That’s something they do: they talk about their exes sometimes, because he still seems to feel a little dazed that he isn’t getting married any more, and there’s still an extra-big place in her heart reserved for Cody, which is stupid and fucked up because they’re totally done now. That doesn’t stop her feeling sad about him sometimes, like the fact he’s dating some other girl now, because part of her always thought they’d be together again one day, like the two of them were endgame. She still thinks Cody might be the Ross to her Rachel. She still thinks he might be her lobster. She’s pretty certain that Zayn doesn’t feel that way about Perrie, even though he can be a little nostalgic sometimes, but she thinks he understands it anyway.

“Really? In a nice way?” she asks.

“Yeah, of course. She’s a nice girl.”

“I know. Taylor said she was. You know all her band flew on Taylor’s private jet when they performed at her show?”

“Yeah, I know. How _is_ Taylor?” Whenever he asks about Taylor, which is definitely more often than he asks about any of her other friends, his voice always sounds kind of mocking. She gets that. Taylor’s an easy person to make fun of, mostly because she’s ridiculous in almost every way.

“Taylor’s great. She says hi.” That’s a lie. Taylor would say, “Really, Gigi?” and then, “Ugh.”

Zayn definitely knows it’s a lie, judging from his face, and then the fact that he sings “Why you always lying?” like he’s totally unaware that she gets a huge ladyboner every time she hears him do anything even a little melodic.

“I know,” she says. “When she saw those pictures of us she called me like, ‘Why are you dating him? Does he even shower?’”

“What did you say?”

“I was like, ‘Not as often as he should’. I was kidding.”

“You better have been kidding!” He lifts up his arm and they spend a moment frantically wrestling as he tries to press her face into his armpit and she tries to resist. He wins, because her life is horrible, but luckily he mostly just smells like men’s deodorant, which is wolfsbane or bear-fighting pheromones or whatever overkill masculine scent his particular deodorant brand insists on. When he lets her finally pull away there’s a huge mascara stain on his $400 white shirt, which feels a lot like karma.

“She doesn’t like me,” Zayn tells her, a little out of breath. “Ever since she went out with Harry.”

“Why? Did you hit on her behind his back?”

Zayn laughs for a moment too long, which is awkward. “You’d be surprised,” he says.

Gigi screws up her face at him. “Ew. Did you date her too? Why is everyone so incestuous? I wish all my friends would stop having sex with the rest of my friends. Like, Selena and Hailey and Justin, and Selena and Ellie and Niall, and Taylor and Cara and Kendall and Harry, and me and Taylor and Joe, I guess.”

“Add me into that Harry list,” Zayn says, and wiggles his eyebrows.

“Wait.” She stares at him, feeling the pit of her stomach drop out like she’s about to stress puke onto Zayn’s white couch. “You and Harry?”

He laughs, as though it was a totally normal thing to say. “You thought she just had a grudge against me for no reason?”

“Sure,” she says. It’s the kind of thing that Taylor would do. Gigi’s waiting for Katy Perry to mysteriously disappear and for her body to wash up on some random beach any day now.

“When I’m so nice?” He sticks out his bottom lip.

“You are the opposite of nice,” she tells him, trying to pretend that she doesn’t want to kiss his face off. “So you’ve been with guys?”

“Well.” He does his thoughtful squinty expression, which reminds her of Justin, so she has to slap him a little. “Ouch! Jesus. Anyway, you were wrong before. Taylor and Harry never had sex.”

“What? No way. Weren’t they together for three months? Did they just, like, get to third base and think ‘All right, that’s enough now, let’s meditate or go for a hike instead’?” She can imagine Taylor doing that. Rolling off a butt-naked guy to find her yoga mat, or to lace up her walking boots to take a five mile hike up into the hills. Sometimes she gets the feeling that Taylor is the queen of blue balls. Gigi respects that.

“Something like that.” He shifts uncomfortably, and rolls his eyes. “Should I be telling you this?”

“Me and Taylor are totally not that close so it’s fine,” she says. She’s going to text this to Kendall later, and Kendall is going to flip out. Well, she hopes Kendall’s going to flip out. More likely, she’s just going to text ‘EWWWWWW’ at Gigi with a whole series of grossed out see and hear no evil monkey emojis. She has actually never heard about any sex that Kendall and Harry did or didn’t have, because Kendall is a total dark horse. Harry seems like the kind of guy who’s respectful, like he wouldn’t speculatively flap his dick at the wrong hole like Joe did at least three times, but who’s also secretly freaky, like a month into your relationship you’d go over to his house and he’d open up a sex chamber with a whole bunch of whips and gimp masks inside and be all “Sorry, mate, but it’d be lovely if you nipple clamped the fuck out of me”. She wonders if Kendall ever nipple clamped the fuck out of Harry, and gets a sudden image of Kendall naked, her face focused, her hair a dark sheet around her face, her hands intent and her eyes wide and turned on. She’s seen Kendall naked before, because they’re lingerie models and have no shame, but she hasn’t actually thought about her like that. For a moment she feels weirdly jittery, and she has to force her attention back onto Zayn. “Tell me, asshole.”

“Taylor’s, like…” He scrunches up his nose. “There are things she doesn’t do. Like, she doesn’t like blow jobs.”

“No girl likes blow jobs except me,” she says, “and that’s why you have to marry me and stay with me forever.”

“Done.” He flicks the end of her nose gently, and then leans in to kiss it. “But she also doesn’t like it when guys go down on her.”

“What?” Gigi blinks at him. “Are you fucking kidding me? What’s the point of life without oral?”

“My thoughts exactly.” He grins at her, slow and dirty, and it’s like she actually feels her pussy throb with want. His tongue between her legs, his fingers inside her. Jesus. “Anyway, they never even did it. Just, you know.” He makes a gesture that’s so explicit it makes her laugh, an unexpected and gross-sounding snort. “Manual stimulation,” he explains.

“Yeah, thanks. I actually figured that out for myself from the…” She tries to mimic his hand gesture and almost sprains her wrist. “God. Poor Calvin,” she says.

“It’s three years later. She’s probably graduated to missionary position with no lights on by now,” Zayn says, because he’s kind of a shithead.

“Asshole,” she says, and swats at his arm, so she can tell Taylor that she stood up for her if this somehow ever gets back to her, which it probably will because she has minions everywhere. “And what happened in the meantime? You kept Harry happy?”

“Pretty much.” He stretches out comfortably, yawns a little. He’s trying too hard to look cool and composed. She knows his game. 

“For how long?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “A while.”

“That could mean weeks or months or years.”

“It can mean exactly what you want it to mean, babe,” he tells her with the sort of finality that means she definitely won’t be able to get any more out of him than that. She nods a little and thinks of him and Harry together. Has Zayn sucked a dick? She looks at Zayn’s mouth and wonders if he touched Harry Styles’s asshole with it once upon a time. She’d be completely okay with it if he had; it’s actually kind of hot. She thinks of Harry on Zayn’s lap, his long crazy hair all tangled around his face, she thinks of Zayn reaching up to push it back, touching him in the gentle way that made Gigi feel so safe with him on their first date, when he’d touched the bottom of her back protectively when they were coming out of a restaurant and she’d thought, _Okay. It might not be you forever, but I’m totally okay with it being you for a while._ She wonders if Zayn and Harry was a thing with feelings, or if it was just a thing with fucking. It doesn’t really matter which, because it’s whatever, it’s over and done now, but God: she wants to know, even though she doesn’t need to. She wants to be in bed in London, or in the shower in Dubai, or in her suite in Paris, and she wants to think about Zayn with his mouth around Harry Styles’s dick, and touch herself. Jesus. She needs to start watching some different porn than she usually does.

She smiles at Zayn, and touches his face, and leans in to kiss him. She wants to say, _I understand why you’re sad about him now._ Instead she just slides onto his lap, and touches the sides of his face, and looks down into his beautiful dark sad eyes. She loved Cody more for sure, but Zayn is definitely hotter. “I won’t tell anyone,” she promises.

“Except Bella.” Zayn rolls his eyes.

“Bella doesn’t count,” she says automatically. It’s weird that she actually never even thought about telling Bella. That’s fucked up. That probably says a lot about their relationship lately.

“I know.” He looks a little pensive again, like he’s sad that he doesn’t have his own Bella to tell secrets to any more. She wonders who his Bella used to be. He doesn’t ever talk about his friends from Bradford, and even though he mentions Liam sometimes and occasionally Harry and Niall, he never talks about Louis. He was probably Zayn’s Bella from another motherella, if it still hurts that badly. Bella isn’t even her Bella now, which sucks a lot. “You’re so beautiful,” he says, looking up into her eyes.

“Thank you,” she says, feeling herself smile, feeling like maybe he means it. People tell her she’s beautiful a lot, but they also tell her that she needs to lose weight, and that her cheekbones need more definition, and that her nail beds look unhealthy, and that her brows are ragged, and that her stomach could be more toned even though she barely ever eats bread, and then they wonder whether she’s ever considered whatever procedure, or if she’d mind if they photoshopped away her moles, or if she’d practise her walk for another hour. It’s nice knowing that Zayn would never add anything like that onto the end of telling her she’s beautiful. It’s nice knowing that he just wants her to be a normal girl. 

She kisses him then, hard, and he pulls her down closer to him. She grinds down onto him, shifting her hips until she feels his breath hitch. His hand is firm and assured as he touches her thigh under her skirt, between her thighs, and he makes an approving noise as he presses his fingers into her underwear and feels her slick and almost-ready for him. “Shit, you’re wet,” he grunts out.

She isn’t sure how to says, _Sure, because you used to bang a guy and that’s hot_ , so she just kisses him again and bites his lip as he works his finger inside her, thumb pressing against her clit. “You liked what I just told you?” he asks, and his voice is half shaky. “You liked thinking about me and Harry together? You liked thinking about him on his knees for me?”

“You on your knees for him,” she admits, and he says, “Shit,” as she presses a hand down, rubs his cock over his jeans, starts trying to undo them. The denim’s really fucking stiff but she manages it, gets a hand into his pants and his boxers, wraps a hand around the hard silky length of him. “You on your knees,” she says again. “You bent over for him too,” although she never thought about that before. There’s something about it though; bedsheets balled up in Zayn’s hands, a guy’s hands on his hips. Zayn being the one getting pounded into. God, she feels like her whole body’s melting, the hot pressure of Zayn’s hand against her. “Did you do that?” she asks. “Did you like it?”

“Did he fuck me? Yeah,” Zayn says, reaching up for her, dragging her face down. He kisses her in a way that feels like it might leave a bruise. “A lot. I liked it any way we did it. He’d push me around a bit sometimes. I’d shove him too. It was hot.” 

“You’re hot,” she says, which is dumb, but he half laughs, breathless and turned on, his smile wicked even now. He scrambles a little so his jeans are half down, they get her panties off and she sinks down onto him then, and it’s bliss, it’s sweet hot relief, and she hears herself cry out, fingernails raking down his chest, his shirt that’s still on, pressing her forehead against his, both sweat-dampened. She feels whole when he’s inside her, she always has. She wonders if Harry felt that way too. She wonders if Kendall felt that way when Harry fucked her. She wonders if they did this, if they were so desperate they couldn’t wait to get their clothes off, if Kendall ever rode Harry in her shirt and skirt, if she ever threw her head back and clung to Harry’s shoulders like he was the only thing keeping her rooted to the earth. Gigi squeezes her eyes shut and thinks of Kendall’s face, Kendall underneath her, Kendall with a cock somehow: those pictures she’s seen online of other women, black leather and strap-ons, obscene and hot. She imagines riding her, the sweet scent of Kendall’s shampoo and the salty scent of her pussy, Kendall’s fingers on her clit like Zayn’s are right now. 

Coming breaks over her like a wave. She usually tries to do this prettily, tries to school her face, tries to look like a girl online would look, neat and turned on and still keeping a little part of herself tucked away, but Zayn pushes up her shirt and pulls down her bra and she feels his mouth on her nipple, his teeth light and sharp and sweet, and that’s what does it for her. She hears herself cursing as she comes even though, God, she’s always tried to be such a good girl. Kendall’s mouth, her silky hair, her dark unwavering gaze. Kendall’s first smile afterwards would break over her face like a sunrise, shy and wondering and gorgeous. It would be the most beautiful thing Gigi had ever seen. Harry and Zayn: she wonders what Zayn looked like after, in the morning, the next day, if he was the same way that he is with her. She wonders if he ever let himself be held, if that was something that he kept for Harry alone. She lets him grab onto her hips and pound into her and finish inside her and then she sags against him, her heart pounding, his arms tight around her. Afterwards she kisses him. Was he like this for Harry, she wonders, did Harry feel the same affection for him that she does? His messy hair, his thin wrists. She could have loved Zayn, she thinks, if it wasn’t for all the others, but maybe that’s just post-orgasm stupidity talking. She touches his hair and then his mouth with the tips of her fingers, and he nips at them, a little too sharp.

Finally she gets off him, her thighs damp, and slumps beside him on the couch. He’s doing that thing that guys do, that fucking gross thing, playing with his post-sex soft dick. She wishes he’d stop but it’d probably be weird and rude and potentially painful to slap his hands off himself. She squeezes her eyes shut until she can see cities rising behind her eyelids, golden and epic. The fire in the grate ahead of them is dancing in the dark. Beside her Zayn says, finally, “Huh.”

“Yeah,” she says, her eyes still closed. God, she must look fucking stupid with her shirt pulled up around her neck and her bra yanked down and one tit out, but he probably looks just as dumb with his clothes on and his dick out. Even still, she tucks her boobs away. It’s for the best. Maybe she won’t text Kendall to tell her about any of this stuff after all. “Huh.”

*

“Is Zayn your boyfriend yet?” Kendall asks, the next time they hang out.

“Nope,” Gigi tells her. There isn’t any ice cream today, because they’re at Gigi’s place. Instead, she has provided grapes and apples and crackers like a thoughtful hostess, and Kendall is repaying her by being a pissy little child about it. That’s probably a good thing because at least it’s keeping Gigi’s inappropriately sexual thoughts about her at bay. 

“Why not?” Kendall splits one of her Oreos in half. Gigi can’t believe Kendall actually brought cookies in her purse instead of eating one of Gigi’s carefully curated snacks. She’s tempted to yell “We’re done professionally!” in Kendall’s face, like the kind of extremely old internet meme that Zayn keeps Whatsapping her because she has the horrible misfortune to be dating a huge nerd. “I mean,” Kendall adds, before taking a three second break to lick frosting out of her Oreo, which she does with indecent attention to detail, “you seem to like him.”

“I do,” Gigi says. That’s honest, at least. “I like him a lot.”

“So, make him your boyfriend.”

“You never made Harry your boyfriend.”

“You and me weren’t even friends when I was dating Harry, so you don’t know what we were like. I mean, I don’t even know if we were dating.” Kendall makes the sort of weird face that reminds Gigi of sitting on the couch with her mom and sister and a big blanket, watching her on the first season of _Keeping Up With The Kardashians_. She never makes faces like that where people can see her and take photographs of her any more, which is probably kind of sad. “It was complicated. And anyway, me and Harry are irrelevant. That was so long ago.”

“But you guys still talk.”

“Yeah, but I talk to everyone. I like to keep things chilled.”

“Also, you never have serious relationships,” Gigi points out.

Kendall’s eyebrows draw together in a frown. “So? I’m twenty. I don’t have to be serious.”

“And your sister’s eighteen and she’s been dating Tyga since…”

“Since it was totally not legal,” Kendall says, looking like a disapproving grandmother.

“My point is,” Gigi continues, “that age isn’t a factor or whatever.” She chopped up carrot sticks too and she kind of wants to get them out of the fridge, but she feels like Kendall might scorn them too and she doesn’t know if she can take that. 

“My mom always talks about this stuff,” Kendall says. “She says that it would be good for the show if I had a boyfriend.”

“Because Tyga and Kanye provide you with so much quality content,” Gigi says.

Kendall snorts. “Well, Scott does, at least. My mom wanted me to date Zayn, actually.”

“He probably would have,” Gigi says, because Zayn is many things but ‘picky about which Victoria’s Secret model he dates’ is not one of them. “He told me he thought you didn’t like him.”

“Well, I didn’t like him,” Kendall says, and then frowns and says quickly: “I thought he was sweet but I didn’t _like him_ like him, you know? I’m not attracted to him.”

“Okay,” Gigi says. She knows she’s biased, but all of the internet and pretty much all anecdotal evidence she’s collected has come to the conclusion that everyone in the world is attracted to Zayn. 

“My mom wanted it to happen, though. She was like ‘Haaaave you met Kendall?’ She gets her dating tips from Barney Stinson. And he was like…” She narrows her eyes and tilts her head in a way that actually looks kind of like Zayn and says, slowly, “Hiyuh, Kendull.”

“That is not what he sounds like,” Gigi says because she should probably show a little loyalty to him.

“It absolutely is.”

Gigi makes a face at her, because she’s right. “Anyway, you can’t have him.”

“I don’t want him! You sound possessive for someone who doesn’t have a boyfriend.” Kendall smiles at her brightly. Her teeth are half covered in Oreo chocolate. Gigi despairs of her.

“He was telling me about Harry,” she says instead. For a moment she wonders how much she should say. Does Kendall need to know that her ex-boyfriend used to hook up with Gigi’s current boyfriend? It doesn’t feel like she does, and anyway, Gigi kind of got the feeling that not many people know about it, and she likes Zayn, okay? He’s a good guy, and he doesn’t really deserve her telling everyone about his big gay romance that may or may not still mean something to him. Instead she says, “I think he misses him a lot,” which is true. She knows that the issue of Louis is probably more painful for Zayn, but that can wait until they’ve both calmed down a little more. Zayn seemed pretty calm about Harry – just sad, in a low key way where his heart probably isn’t breaking, but like maybe he feels like it could have ended better, which is definitely true.

“Well, Harry’s in town for a while.” Kendall’s inspecting one of her nails. “Ew, do you have a nail file?”

“Yeah.” Gigi gets up from her kitchen stool and finds one in the pot of useful things she keeps next to her speakers. The pot of useful things is something that she took from her mom, along with a high maintenance approach to eyebrow upkeep, starting her Christmas shopping sometime in August, and an unhealthy attitude regarding carbs. “Go wash your hands,” she tells Kendall, so the Oreo gunk doesn’t get in the way of a good manicure, and Kendall does so obediently. When she’s back, Gigi shifts her stool closer and takes Kendall’s hand in both of hers. “Which nail?”

“This one.” Kendall wiggles her ring finger.

“It isn’t so bad.”

“I know. But it’s annoying.”

“You’re annoying.”

“Wow, excuse me,” Kendall says, and laughs a little. Gigi can feel Kendall’s eyes on her; for some reason her gaze feels more like a weight than usual. The back of her neck feels a little sweatier than ideally she’d like it to. Kendall’s hands are cool and dry, and her skin is smooth and her fingers are long and slender. Girls’ hands are so different to guys’ hands. Sometimes Zayn has dirty nails, and bruises on his knuckles. Gigi doesn’t ask about those. There are some things she figures that she just doesn’t want to know. 

She files Kendall’s nail carefully until it isn’t uneven any more, and then looks up at her with a smile. There’s something on Kendall’s face that’s unguarded and unfocused, her lips a little parted, and for a moment Gigi’s chest does something weird, as though there are a thousand roses blooming inside it. Then Kendall looks away and pulls her hand back and says “Thank you,” as she inspects it. 

“No problem,” Gigi says, feeling a little colder.

Kendall balls her hands up in her lap. “So like I was saying, Harry’s in town.”

“For how long? Zayn’s going home soon to see his family for Christmas.”

“I assume Harry is too, so that’s irrelevant,” Kendall points out, a little sharper than usual. “Where are you going for Christmas?”

“I don’t know yet,” Gigi says. Her mom makes a bunch of plans but she doesn’t usually stick to them, which, whatever, Gigi’s over it, and she’ll just go where she’s told to go. “Are you staying here?”

“Yeah. Well, I’m going to Calabasas, obviously, to stay at my mom’s house.”

“Is your dad spending Christmas with you guys this year?”

“I, um…” Kendall frowns sharply and looks down at her hand again, straightening it out. “I don’t actually know what she’s doing. I guess so, maybe. I hope so.”

“It feels weird,” Gigi says, because there aren’t really any other words. Caitlyn is awesome, and apparently she’s a lot less cranky and more fun than Bruce was, but that isn’t even close to the point. The point is that Kendall’s parents are divorced now, and she thinks that sometimes her dad feels like a totally different person now, and that’s weird and new and something to adjust to, and it has to suck sometimes. Gigi’s mom is getting divorced from her stepdad, but that isn’t really too much of a big deal. She’s had more upheaval in her life than Kendall has. She knows how to deal with it better, even though she’s still kind of sad. “But you’ll be okay.”

“Yeah.” Kendall flashes her the smallest smile ever. “So are we going to Parent Trap the hell out of those boys?” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “It is sad that they don’t talk any more. Harry was sad about it even two years ago and if Zayn’s sad about it now…”

“We could tell them to meet us somewhere and then not show up,” Gigi suggests. The boys would bump into each other and it would be like a hilarious dumb movie and then they’d yell at each other and break the ice and then be friends again. She feels it might be more complicated than that though, if Zayn and Harry used to sleep together. Sex complicates everything. It’s fun but it’s definitely also a total bitch. “Or,” she adds, “we could just meet for dinner and bring them with us.”

“People would go crazy,” Kendall points out. “Like, even if me and Harry were pictured together.”

“So we meet somewhere different from usual,” Gigi says.

“Not the Nice Guy?” Kendall asks. She’s smirking a little.

“What’s wrong with the Nice Guy?” Gigi asks.

“Nothing,” Kendall says. “I hear photographers like to hang around outside there, that’s all.”

“What can I say?” Gigi says. She can feel herself blushing a little, which is dumb. “I like it when things are mutually beneficial. Sometimes it’s good to mix business and pleasure.”

Kendall laughs, and reaches out to eat one of Gigi’s carefully cut up apple slices, although obviously she dunks it in full-fat peanut butter first so it isn’t too healthy. “I feel you there. Get that money.”

“So what’s our aim here, anyway, with this whole meeting for dinner thing?” Gigi asks, popping a couple of grapes off their stems. 

“For them to be friends again,” Kendall says, wide-eyed and sweet and sincere. “For them to be happy.”

 _For Zayn to get another chance to blow Harry Styles,_ Gigi accidentally thinks. The image of it in her head is so delicious that she has to shift a little on her kitchen stool. “Absolutely,” she lies. “For them to be happy.”

*

Zayn complains a whole lot when Gigi tells him they’re going out for dinner, because in his heart he’s pretty much just a cantankerous old man. She knows that if it was up to him, he’d like to sit around in his paint-stained jeans and no shirt with his heating turned way up all night, alternately eating leftovers and her pussy, but she is absolutely the boss here so they’re going to do exactly what she wants instead. When she gets to his house he’s wearing jeans she hasn’t seen before and scuffed up Doc Martens and his hair is freshly dyed, which means he made an effort. His eyes almost fall out of his head when he sees her in her tight dress, which is gratifying. “You’re so much taller than me in those shoes,” he says, sounding amazed. “I sometimes forget I’m going out with an actual model.”

“Remember it, baby. You’re a lucky guy,” she tells him, and stands by his front door tapping her foot and trying to look severe as he runs around apologising for taking forever as he tries to remember where he left his wallet and cards and phone. In the car he curls a hand around her knee in the sort of casually possessive way that she loves, and shoots her a quiet, private smile, thumb stroking down between her knees. She kind of wishes he’d move it further up her thigh, but then again, she uses this driver all the time when she’s in LA so it might be kind of embarrassing.

“What’d you do today?” he asks vaguely when they’re almost halfway there. He’s still stroking her leg, which is almost irritating because his touch is sending pulses of want through her body. That isn’t really what she needs right before having to sit through a meal at a restaurant, looking like a normal person and not as though her maybe-boyfriend was using his magically orgasmic fingers on a particularly sensitive part of her leg ten minutes ago.

“I hung out with Kendall,” she says, which is true. They went for breakfast and then they went to spend some time with Kendall’s sister Kourtney and her kids, who are all super playful and crazy and spoilt in the best and most adorable way. 

“You’re always hanging out with Kendall.”

“That’s because she’s my best friend.” Gigi doesn’t think she’s said those words aloud to Zayn before, which is dumb, because it feels like something he should have always known.

“Nice.” Zayn’s smile does something more inverted, something a little wistful. 

“You’re my other best friend,” she tells him.

“You’re mine too,” he tells her, which is a lie because they’ve been dating for almost no time at all, but she leans in for a kiss anyway.

“She used to date your Harry,” she says afterwards.

“He isn’t my Harry,” Zayn says. Even in the lack-of-light she can tell he’s flushing a little. “And they never went out properly. That was fake as fuck.” 

“Are you just saying that because you’re bummed out he cheated on you with her?”

Zayn actually turns his head properly to look at her at that, his eyebrow arched. If he didn’t look so pretty right now, she’d probably feel bad for going too far. “Sorry,” she says.

He rolls his eyes. “He didn’t cheat on me. It was just a mates with benefits thing. A way to get a bit when we were on the road without me cheating on Perrie with some random girl.”

“You didn’t do it at home?” she asks, because God, she wants details. She wants to know about Zayn’s stubble rasping against another guy’s, and the power between them. There’s always part of her that’s dimly aware that when she’s with a guy, most of the time he could overpower her if he wanted to. She always thought she was super strong and in shape and then she and Cody were having some dumb playfight and started wrestling, and he pinned her down in maybe ten seconds. She remembers not being able to move and the almost-panic that set in even though she loved him, even though she trusted him. Zayn’s kind of skinny and he’s smaller than Cody but he’s still pretty built around his arms and shoulders these days. The idea of Zayn being with someone he could totally let go with is a mental image that she definitely likes.

“Gi…” he says, and then relents. “Maybe. A few times. It wasn’t anything. It was more than him and Kendall, though. Harry’s track record at being unable to get any further than a bit of fingering with your mates was legendary. But he’ll play along with stuff, he’ll do what people tell him even if it isn’t real. I think he might just do it to be polite. Whatever.” He shrugs, and turns to look out of the window, and that’s – that’s something. The idea of Kendall and Harry being completely fake is something that Gigi hadn’t particularly considered before, because Kendall’s her best friend, right? And she’d like to think that of all people, Kendall wouldn’t lie to her. She kind of wants to get the car to turn around and take them home, wants to pull Zayn down between her legs on his bed and then ride him and then maybe do some of the butt stuff he likes that he probably learned from Harry. Maybe this whole thing isn’t a great idea after all.

But then the car stops and they’re suddenly there, at an Italian place that Kendall chose. It’s carb heavy, but it’s Christmas, right? Gigi’s going to break away from some of her mom’s traditions and decide that calories during December don’t count, and that gifts can be opened before noon on Christmas Day, and that maybe Santa Claus is real and out there, because she got told he was fake way too young. She needs to enjoy everything; this has been the best year of her life and she needs to bathe in that feeling. She has campaigns that are released soon and more deals going on, and life is sweet.

It would probably be sweeter if Kendall hadn’t felt the urge to lie to her, but that isn’t the point.

Zayn holds her hand when they go into the restaurant, because essentially he’s a good guy who does the right and proper thing whenever he remembers to, and then he squeezes it way too hard so her knuckles pretty much crack into tiny pieces as he snaps: “What the fuck?”

Gigi looks past him. At the other end of the restaurant, in the corner, are Harry and Kendall at a table for two. Kendall’s leaning into him and laughing and Harry’s lips are curled in a way that probably means he’s halfway through telling a bad joke. Gigi hasn’t ever met him for long, and even she knows that his jokes are terrible but his delivery is cute. 

“Did you know they were going to be here?” Zayn says, through gritted teeth.

“No?” she says, trying her best to look adorable as hell so he doesn’t get mad.

He glares at her as though a raincloud has lowered itself down onto his head and started pissing all over him, so apparently the adorable thing isn’t working. “What did you want to accomplish from this?” he snaps.

“Nothing,” she says, and reaches out and takes his hands. She can half see out of the corner of her eye that Harry and Kendall have stopped eating or talking or doing whatever it was that they were doing. They’re still, and she’s pretty sure that she can feel their eyes on her and Zayn. “I just thought that you’d like it.”

“Yeah. I fucking love it. Merry fucking Christmas,” he snaps. “I’m going.”

“Zayn—”

“I’m leaving! Jesus! I’ve tried so hard to make my life my own and to separate myself off from them, at least for now, and you don’t even listen to me or what I want! Do you know how long I’ve had to deal with no one listening to me?” His ears and neck are turning red and his eyes are dark and angry, and she never wanted to be the girl who gets yelled at by a guy in the middle of a restaurant. That isn’t okay at all. She is resolutely not that person.

She narrows her eyes at him. “Don’t talk to me like that,” she tells him. “Aside from the fact that you’re being extremely disrespectful, what do you think the staff here are going to think of you and me? Ignore the fucking headlines, Zayn fucking Malik screams at Gigi Hadid in public, they’re gonna think you’re an asshole.” She pushes a finger into his chest. “Which you’re _not_.”

“I am,” Zayn says, and turns his head to look at Harry and Kendall. She sees his Adam’s apple move in his throat as he swallows, and the tenseness is gone from his face now, leaving behind a sort of tender desperation that hurts her to look at it. “I am an asshole. And he knows it.”

“We can all be assholes at times,” Gigi says sternly, and starts prodding him down the aisle towards them, muttering “Don’t be stupid,” in his ear from behind him. He throws her a dirty look over his shoulder, because she has made the horrible decision to date a petulant brat. She’ll be rethinking her life choices after tonight.

But maybe she won’t, because Harry’s unfolding himself from his chair like Kendall’s completely forgotten beside him. His eyes are on Zayn’s face and there’s something vulnerable and open about his expression that makes Gigi’s chest kind of ache. She doesn’t remember the last time someone looked at her like that. Maybe she hasn’t ever hurt anyone enough. 

“Hello there,” he says as Gigi and Zayn reach him. Next to him, Kendall slips around the other side of the table so she can hug Gigi hi. Her lips drag over Gigi’s cheek for a moment and Gigi feels her heart do something weird and inconvenient before she hears Kendall murmur “I’m so glad you’re here,” in her ear, her hand on Gigi’s waist. 

“You eating with us?” Harry asks Zayn, as though Gigi isn’t even there. “We should get a bigger table.” He’s taller than Zayn although he isn’t quite broader, and he’s wearing an extremely pretty shirt, pale silk, unbuttoned almost halfway down his chest. Gigi would wear that. She thinks she actually already has. Harry’s leaning into Zayn, eyes still steady on him, and God, Zayn can’t even look at him. He can’t even give Harry that.

“Hi, Harry,” she says pointedly, and he looks at her quickly, makes a step to the side and says “I’m so sorry. That was rude of me. It’s lovely to see you again,” before leaning in to kiss her cheek. There’s something very sincere in his eyes, like maybe he’s as nice a guy as Kendall said he is, and there’s also something a little disconcerting about his gaze, like he can see right inside Gigi’s heart. _I want to watch you banging my sort-of boyfriend_ , she says experimentally inside her head, to see what happens.

He doesn’t see far enough into her soul to hear that, which is probably a good thing. Instead they all take their seats at a larger table. Kendall darts into the chair next to Gigi, which leaves Zayn and Harry together on the other side of the table. So far Zayn seems mute, big-eyed, his mouth a tight line like he’s trying hard to hold himself together, and almost failing. “So this is a surprise,” Harry says, in the kind of voice that makes it sound like it isn’t a surprise at all.

“We just thought, you know. That it would be nice,” Kendall says. Gigi presses her knee against hers under the table in solidarity, and Kendall smiles sideways at her. “I mean, it’s sad that you guys haven’t talked, right?”

“It’s life,” Zayn says, his voice hard and flat. He grabs his menu and starts flipping through it hard, like once upon a time it personally wronged him. “Shit happens. You move on.”

“But you were friends,” Gigi says, a little frustrated.

“Actually,” Zayn says, detached in a way that makes Gigi kind of want to throw her fork at his face, “we were never friends.”

Next to him Harry tilts his head to one side and looks at Zayn coolly. Then, after a moment of contemplation, he says “I’d agree with that.”

“Jesus,” Gigi says. “I need wine.”

That kind of breaks the tension a little, which was her intention. Zayn catches her eye and smiles and Harry laughs and Kendall nods fervently, and they flag down a server to order a bottle of their most expensive red. Gigi isn’t planning on getting wasted, because obviously not, but she feels like maybe it would help them all a little. And it gets easier after that; Zayn stays silent but his scowl starts to fade away, and Harry makes polite conversation about how much he likes LA and Kendall agrees with him and Gigi looks between the two of them and wonders how much of it was fake, and how much of it continues to be fake, and whether Kendall was ever planning on telling her the truth. Harry is pretty much the only guy she ever thought Kendall hooked up with, because she knows the Justin stuff was all just rumours. Maybe she isn’t as much of an open book as Gigi had thought. There’s something that’s kind of shameful about having believed the Harry stuff, like maybe she shouldn’t have told Kendall about when she was fourteen and lost her virginity to a nineteen year old and wound up crying in his shower after, or the time Joe yelled at her right up in her face after she found him snorting coke at ten in the morning, or the first time she slept over at Zayn’s house and found him sobbing on his cell phone in the hallway halfway through the night when he thought she was asleep. Kendall’s the only person in the world who knows she saw that. Kendall’s the only person other than her who knows about all of those things, because Bella would judge the hell out of her and her mom would call Joe and scream at him, so Kendall was the only option. Honesty is embarrassing when it isn’t being repaid.

But maybe she isn’t being totally honest either. Kendall just thinks that Zayn and Harry are two friends who fell out, two bros who never sucked each other’s dicks and made it complicated and weird and sad. But that isn’t Gigi’s secret to tell. She thinks it’s probably best to keep her mouth shut, so she smiles and agrees that the weather is good, better than London, and drinks her wine, and asks Harry how the last One Direction promo tour was, and orders lasagne because go big or go home, and laughs at the crazy adorable pictures of Mason and Penelope and Reign and North and Saint that Kendall shows Harry on her phone.

“I need to see them again some time,” Harry says, and Kendall says, “You guys, you have no idea how much Mason loved him.”

“Kids always liked Harry,” Zayn says unexpectedly, and addresses him for the first time: “You’re good with them.” 

“Probably because I have the same level of intellect as them,” Harry says, and Zayn smiles. It’s actually a pretty gorgeous smile. If it was directed at Gigi, it would probably make her stomach flutter, but it’s directed at Harry, and Harry’s smiling right back, keen and affectionate. _We were never friends_ , Gigi hears Zayn say again. Yeah. Sure. Right. Whatever.

*

Her lasagne is good, and her wine is better, and it’s easy to talk. She exchanges stories with Kendall, tells the others what Donatella Versace’s like. “She told me she was going to follow you on Instagram,” she tells Zayn, and he nods a bit and says, “She did.” 

Next to him, Harry half-smiles and turns to shake his head at Zayn. “Don’t even try it,” Zayn says, half-smiling right back at him. “Told you I’d beat you to it.”

“We used to talk about doing campaigns,” Harry explains. “I know you two are the proper models but…”

“We aren’t proper models,” Kendall says, and then rolls her eyes. “Well, we are, but not in the traditional sense, you know? Like, social media helped us when we started out. You guys would be the same way.”

“Maybe,” Zayn says, focused on his pizza like it’s case closed and all he wants is for the rest of them to shut up. It’s the same kind of face Gigi’s little brother makes when she and her sister and her mom start talking about _Pretty Little Liars_ or Blake Lively’s hair or whether or not Tom Cruise still talks to Suri at the dinner table. Sometimes he starts pretending to be a zombie and letting half-chewed food drool out of the side of his mouth, but Gigi’s assuming that Zayn’s too old and vain to do that.

Next to him Harry says, “You’d be great at that. Remember we talked about—”

“—Gucci,” Zayn says. Harry’s elbow is on the armrest of Zayn’s chair, which Gigi is totally fine with. “Yeah,” Zayn says, eyes on Harry’s face. “I remember that.”

“Really?” Harry asks.

“I remember more than you think, probably,” Zayn says, and Harry’s smiling properly now, slow and happy.

“O- _kay_ ,” Kendall says to her pasta, before catching Gigi’s eye and wiggling her eyebrows delightedly. There’s definitely something that feels weird about the way that the guys are looking at each other, but then Zayn looks over at her and his lips tilt up in one corner in a way that’s kind of reassuring. It’s strange that the two of them, Harry and Zayn, have so much history together. Family aside, Gigi doesn’t have that kind of connection with anyone – the shared past, the ability to understand someone with just one glance. There’s Cody but he feels lost to her now, and maybe Kendall; they’ve been through shoots together, fashion weeks, private jets, but Harry and Zayn have five years behind them and a whole lot of pain too. She and Kendall don’t have any of that yet. God, she hopes Kendall doesn’t ever hurt her. She doesn’t feel like she would, but Harry probably felt that about Zayn once upon a time too.

There’s a moment of quiet, and then Harry says, “Have you spoken to Louis?”

Zayn raises an eyebrow and says around a mouthful of pizza, “As if.”

“I think he’d probably want to talk to you,” Harry says, in his politely meandering way. He takes a billion years to get a sentence out of his mouth. If Gigi knew him any better she’d want to kill him, but it probably suits Zayn well since he’s so intent on thinking about what he wants to say before he says it. “His baby’s due soon,” Harry says.

“Yeah, I was wondering about that. Definitely his?” Zayn asks.

“Well, they’re going to do a paternity test,” Harry says, quieter. “But I feel like at this point it’s—”

“He’s invested?” Zayn says.

“Basically.” Harry frowns at his wine glass. “He’ll be upset if it isn’t his, and I think it definitely is his because Briana’s nice and I don’t think she’d lie, but I still don’t think he’s totally chuffed it’s happening at all.”

“Well.” Zayn lets out a breath. “It was always the worst case scenario, wasn’t it?”

Harry shrugs a shoulder and then says to Gigi and Kendall, “Sorry. But—”

“I get it,” Kendall says. “You don’t want to do that unplanned with someone you don’t know too well.”

“Yeah.” Harry looks at Zayn again and says, “He’d probably want to talk, if you called him.”

“I deleted his number,” Zayn says, a little too short. “And yours, actually.”

There’s another pause and then Harry says, more quietly now: “Right.”

“No offence,” Zayn says.

“But you kept Niall and Liam’s numbers?”

Zayn nods.

“Slightly offended,” Harry says.

“Awkward,” Gigi says, to diffuse the situation. She likes being with Zayn and all but when it gets awkward and all he does is say nothing and look moodily into space like there’s smoke being blown in his face, she definitely wants to roll her eyes at him until they fall out of her head.

“Totally awkward,” Kendall agrees, and laughs easily. “Harry, did you send him one too many lameass texts with, like, Kafka and Bukowski quotes in them? I remember them warmly.”

“I didn’t mind the Bukowski,” Zayn says, and smiles at Harry again, long and fond like he hung the stars in the sky once upon a time. “Remember that ee cummings?”

“This is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart?” Harry asks.

“Whatever a moon has always meant,” Zayn says, like all of a sudden he’s some kind of beret wearing shit talking English major undergrad.

“That one was you,” Harry says. “I was the sun.”

“I remember,” Zayn says, and smiles, small but warm. “I think you’re still probably the sun.”

“Oh,” Harry says, looking quietly overjoyed. “Am I?”

“I gotta pee,” Kendall says firmly. Although Gigi’s bladder is doing just fine, the urge to get out of the room is pretty strong. It’s like the whole thing is melting around the four of them, like they’re just a tiny scooped out cube in the middle and there’s nothing but their table, and Gigi’s chest is getting kind of tight. She hasn’t seen that look in Zayn’s eyes before, naked and stark and truthful, and it’s good, she likes it because it’s probably good for him, but she’s starting to think that maybe she’s more likely to get her heart unexpectedly broken than any hot guy-on-guy action. She gets up and drops her napkin onto her chair, and throws Zayn a small, tight smile before following Kendall to the bathrooms at the back of the restaurant. They pee in side by side stalls like always and sing to each other to disguise the noise, some old Lady Gaga song this time, _baby, I was born this way_ , and at the hand basins afterwards Kendall raises an eyebrow at her in the mirror. “So, those boys…”

“Yeah,” Gigi says. “That’s a thing, I guess.” So her secret’s gone, kind of, or Harry and Zayn’s secret, or whatever. Kendall’s secret is the only one left, or so she probably thinks. Maybe Kendall doesn’t even think it’s a secret. Maybe it’s just one of the many things on a long list of shit she hasn’t bothered to tell Gigi about. Maybe they were never as close as she thought, so she never got close to the secrets. She always kind of figured that Kendall was asexual maybe, or so far back in the closet that not even she had worked out what was going on yet. But apparently she’s gay enough to have fake relationships with pop stars, so maybe she’s a real life baby dyke and she just doesn’t want to get up close with Gigi’s vag or something, so she hasn’t said anything about it because it’s totally irrelevant. Not that that matters. Not that Gigi even particularly wants her to. 

“A real thing?” Kendall asks, twisting her hair onto the top of her head before dropping it again. “A love thing?”

“I don’t know,” Gigi says, and then frowns at her reflection. She looks paler than she would like to, but the lighting is kind of shitty so it’s probably just that. Her cheekbones look well highlighted, which is something. She wipes away a little smudged eyeliner from her tear duct with her fingertip. “I would assume not, since I’m dating Zayn and all.”

“They seem kind of into each other,” Kendall says, blithely ignoring the last part of what Gigi said, because whatever. “Isn’t that weird? Is this just what guys are like when they’re friends? I need to get more guy friends so I can look at them talking to each other.” She half laughs.

“I mean, maybe,” Gigi says, and then admits: “Zayn told me they were kind of…”

Kendall’s face brightens and she turns away from the mirror towards Gigi. “You know, I actually figured, back when me and Harry were dating, that maybe they were kind of…”

“Except that you and Harry weren’t really dating because it was fake,” Gigi points out. Her voice sounds weirdly severe even to herself, so she leans into the mirror again and pulls some blotting papers out of her purse even though there isn’t much of a sheen to her skin. She goes over her T-zone carefully and then dots concealer onto a small red blemish just next to one of her eyebrows. Her reflection looks so fucked up, the corners of her mouth pointing downward, like not even her smile belongs to her right now. “Did your mom make you do that for a storyline or something? I gotta tell you, it’s pretty fucked up to lie to your best friend.”

There’s silence from beside her and then Kendall says, sounding a little dazed, “We didn’t put Harry in the show, so – so I don’t get what…”

“Zayn told me.” Gigi looks Kendall’s reflection in the eye. “He said the whole thing was fake.”

“The whole thing wasn’t…” Kendall frowns and looks away. “It wasn’t fake totally. Like, we made out a few times but there wasn’t really… there wasn’t…” She huffs out a sigh and says “Why do you believe whatever bullshit Zayn comes out with, anyway?”

“Because he has no reason to lie,” Gigi says. “He doesn’t give a shit about whoever Harry dates—”

“Oh, really?” Kendall says. Her voice is getting louder, which is weird because she never yells. “Really? You saw them out there. You really think he doesn’t care who Harry dates? Maybe he doesn’t care so long as Harry still sucks his—”

“All right, whatever,” Gigi says. She doesn’t want to think about that right now, which is fucked up because earlier she was definitely thinking about watching Zayn get blown and banged by another guy, because it’s hot, okay? It’s hot that a guy can be into a bunch of stuff like that without thinking it makes him less of a man, and that he can be comfortable in his own skin. It makes her feel like they’re even, knowing that Zayn doesn’t think getting fucked makes you the one who’s lesser. And beside that there’s something visually appealing about two guys together, tattooed chests and broad shoulders and raw power, not like the porn she’s seen which usually stars some poor woman who winds up with jizz in her hair and some kind of defined role, a total sub or a total dom. That doesn’t sit anywhere along the lines of what Gigi wants for herself. She wants porn for her, right in front of her eyes, her kind-of boyfriend doing what she does with him with another hot guy, and loving it. Or she wanted it earlier anyway, before that hungry, lost, adoring look opened up in Zayn’s eyes and she realised there was a whole other layer to him, something she hadn’t even begun to reach.

She turns to Kendall, and tries to collect herself, but it’s hard. She feels like she’s all over the world, like she’s made of dandelion fluff and someone just blew her away. “It just freaks me out that you weren’t honest with me,” she says. “I get that people do that in this industry, okay? I know that Taylor’s done it and Selena thinks it’s kind of funny to play up to it. I just wish you had been truthful. That’s all.”

Kendall shrugs a shoulder. She’s wearing a black sweater that’s slipping off it and her skin is smooth and creamy, with an indented pink line from where her bra strap’s slipped a little. It makes something tender and terrible open up inside Gigi’s chest. The half-moon of pale skin behind Kendall’s ear, the arch of her foot, the baby soft skin on the inside of her upper arms. The curve of her bottom lip and the shy way she smiles sometimes even now they’ve known each other for years. Gigi feels like everything is turning into tangled knots that she doesn’t know how to undo, like maybe the next thing that happens might be the kind of thing they can’t come back from. “No one’s truthful all the time,” Kendall says, softly. “And I just – God.” She rolls her eyes. “With every guy I keep waiting, you know? I’m like, maybe this is the one. Maybe he’ll waken up whatever it is inside of me that I haven’t figured out yet. Like, Kylie and her boyfriend, I know he’s an asshole but she’s so into him and I haven’t felt that yet and I keep thinking that maybe one day I will. Except it’s just…” She dips her head, hair falling around her face. “It’s so exhausting. Not even Harry, and he’s so cute and so nice. Like, if I dated him, he would be good to me. Despite what Taylor says.”

They share a smile then, which feels good and normal, almost. Gigi gives Kendall more space to speak, leaves it hanging open, and finally she does. “I just feel like I’m never going to meet a guy who makes me feel those fireworks.” Her voice cracks a little and shudders away into the quiet, and finally she looks up at Gigi and shrugs her bare shoulder again. “I don’t know.”

“A _guy_ who makes you feel those fireworks,” Gigi says carefully, eyes still on Kendall’s. “That’s what you’re looking for?”

“I don’t know what I’m looking for any more,” Kendall says. “I don’t even think I’m looking. I’m…” Worry flexes in her face before it clears again. “I’m happy hanging out with you,” she says, as though that’s her final answer, and Gigi’s heart does something ridiculous in her chest.

“Good,” she says, and reaches out to take hold of her. It’s usually so easy to sling an arm over Kendall’s shoulders or to kiss her cheek but right now there are miles aching between them. She touches her arm instead, her fingers curling around Kendall’s wrist. “And I’m always here, okay? For anything.”

“Yeah,” Kendall says, a second too late, eyes flickering down to Gigi’s hand. “Yeah. I know.”

*

Back at their table, Zayn’s still talking to Harry, close and intimate. When Gigi slides back into her seat he looks up and says enthusiastically, “Harry was just catching me up on some of the stuff I’ve missed.”

“There’s been quite a lot, as it turns out,” Harry says dryly.

Zayn rolls his eyes at him, affectionate like he’s done it a million times before, and then says to Gigi, “Smoke?”

“Sure,” she says. She wouldn’t classify herself as a smoker or anything but sometimes when other people are doing it, she joins in. It isn’t a big deal. She likes huddling next to Zayn outside with a cigarette in her hand and his arm wrapped loosely around her waist. She feels like someone brand new, like he turned her into the sort of girl she never was before.

“You smoke too much,” Kendall says, her eyes owlishly accusing. 

“I hardly smoke at all,” Gigi says waspishly.

“She met a bad boy and now she can’t help it,” Harry chips in, and wiggles his fingers at Zayn and Gigi. “Peer pressure! Oooooh.”

Zayn cracks up laughing for some reason. “That reminds me of drama at school,” he says, even though usually it would take the whole ceiling collapsing and maybe a dragon farting on him to distract him when he’s on his way outside for a cigarette. “Harry, did you do all that shit? Tableaux about not drink driving or smoking while someone twatted around in the background talking about peer pressure?”

“Course I did,” Harry says. “Then doing _Blood Brothers_ for GCSE and—”

“Everyone trying to do shit Liverpool accents?” Zayn says, and laughs again. He laughs a lot when he’s around Harry, in that way that makes his nose crinkle up at the sides. It’s cute. Gigi always thought that was cute. 

Harry nods, his grin fading but a smile remaining, something smaller and more sincere. “God,” he says to Zayn as though they’re the only people in the whole room, looking helplessly fond, reaching out to touch his hair, elbow resting on the back of Zayn’s chair. “I didn’t know there were still things left for me to find out about you.”

Gigi kind of expects Zayn to pull away, but he doesn’t. Instead he smiles into Harry’s face, sweet and short, before looking over at Gigi like he’s suddenly remembered that she and Kendall exist. “Did you guys do drama at school?” he asks, like he’s an adult coaxing some recalcitrant teenager to join in a conversation.

“A little,” Kendall says, all polite like it’s a job interview. “Then I was home schooled.”

“Who by?” Zayn’s eyebrows shoot up. “Your mum?”

Next to him, Harry cracks up silently, probably at the idea of Kris Jenner attempting to understand and then teach trigonometry.

“No. Jesus,” Kendall says, wrinkling her nose. “Kylie and I had a tutor. If my mom had taught us, half the day would be contouring and the other half just, like, kegels. Which, I mean, that could be useful one day, but not just yet.”

“Kegels?” Harry asks, looking mystified, as Zayn snorts out a laugh, shaking his head before nodding at the back door to Gigi. She follows him out there mutely. It’s cooler outside than she was expecting and goosebumps immediately prickle to life on her bare arms. She takes the cigarette that Zayn offers and leans in so he can light it, looking at his long lashes and his straight nose and the pink curve of his mouth. It feels like time with him is somehow starting to slip away, and she can’t decide whether this dinner was a mistake. On the whole, probably not. It’s good that he’s happy, it’s good that he’s animated. It’s good that she did that for him. 

“Are you happy we tricked you?” she asks him, and he half smiles, squinting up at the faint faraway stars, and says, “I suppose so.”

They’re quiet for a moment, and then she says, “So how long was it for, anyway, you guys?”

“I don’t know,” Zayn says. He isn’t so much of a closed book now, just thoughtful, eyes narrowed against the smoke. “Most of the time, I suppose. Like, the first tour, and on the X Factor tour… on and off since then… I don’t know. A long time. He got pissed off when me and Perrie got engaged.” He shrugs a shoulder noncommittally. “That’s life. But I got pissed off before that because he was all…”

There’s a pause. She can’t decide if she wants to know or not. She takes a drag on her cigarette and says, smoke curling around her words, “He was all what?”

Zayn frowns, looking uncomfortable now. “I probably would have made it more serious back then, if it had been up to me,” he admits. “But he was all up in the fucking air. He doesn’t ever want to make any promises. So it didn’t happen.” His frown deepens into a scowl for a moment and then he makes a visible effort to shake it off and to smile over at Gigi. “And it was a bit shit but it was worth it, because now I have you.”

“Now you have me,” she agrees, feeling that familiar pleasure and warmth as he wraps an arm around her waist and drags her in against his side. He’s so lean, not as solid as Cody or Joe, but when he’s holding her she feels certain about him anyway, like if she fell he’d catch her. God, she hopes that she won’t fall.

His hands are strong and his eyes are on her mouth. “The other night,” he says, “you were thinking about…”

“Puppies and rainbows. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,” she says. “I’m an angel, remember?”

“So Victoria and her secret have claimed.” He grins, slow and sexy, like he isn’t being a huge dork. “You know what I’m talking about. You were thinking about me and Harry. You liked it.”

“I would never.” She widens her eyes at him, smiles, watches the way he glances down at her mouth again. “Maybe. Why not? You’re both cute. Maybe I like the idea of you bending over for another guy. You watch lesbian porn, right?”

“I watch all porn,” he says, which is gross and kind of TMI. He laughs when he sees her face and says, “Sorry. What was it you were thinking about?” His hand’s stroking patterns on her waist and his fingers are sending shivers through her like there’s a direct hotline from where he’s touching right down to her pussy, and his other arm’s loosely down by his side, cigarette in his hand. She likes that he barely has to try at all.

“I was thinking about you,” she tells him, which is half true. “I was thinking about you on your knees. I like sucking dick, right? It’s fun. And I like that maybe you think it’s fun too.” And she was thinking about other things too, of course. Kendall. What her mouth would taste like. What all of her would taste like. Things she’ll never say.

“Is that what you want? You want to see me get down on my knees for Harry?” Zayn asks, and touches his bottom lip with his tongue. “And would you ever…”

“Would I ever blow Harry?” She thinks about it for a moment. He’s cute, nice and smells like he showers a normal amount. Blowing him doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. “Sure,” she says generously.

“No. You and Kendall. Would you ever…” Zayn’s eyes are dark and slitted and his mouth’s cocked up at the corner, almost a smirk. “You know.”

“Oh.” Gigi can feel herself flushing, low and incriminating. She’s glad it’s getting dark. “Would you like if I did? I mean, I’ve never thought about it.” Pants on fire, et cetera.

“Well, it’d be pretty fit,” Zayn says, and then adds, “Perrie—” 

Gigi holds up a finger. “Can we not with the comparisons right now?”

He has the good grace to laugh and look away. “Sorry.”

“No problem.” She tips ash off the end of her cigarette. “So what are you saying, you want me and Kendall to make out or something?” It’s kind of hard to stay cool about this, but she’s managing it, just about. The idea of actually kissing Kendall, though. Her smooth rose petal lips and her soft skin and her sweet-smelling hair. Kissing her would be sweetness and light and give and take. She can feel Zayn’s eyes on her, so she inhales into the night sky and pretends she doesn’t give a shit.

“When we were younger,” Zayn says carefully, “when we were hooking up, me and Harry and sometimes some girls…”

“Oh,” Gigi says, because she can absolutely see where this is going and it’s a little icky. 

“Not always,” he adds, like that makes a difference, which it absolutely does not.

“I get it. Sometimes you got teenagers to have threeways with you and sometimes you were cutesy and romantic and lit candles and made sweet love just the two of you, staring into each other’s eyes or whatever bullshit like that,” she says, and smiles to soften the caustic tone in her voice.

“Shut up,” he mutters.

“Are you hoping to get back into his pants by offering him me and Kendall? Is that it?” she asks, just in case it’s true and she has him wrong and he’s actually a disgusting monster.

“No, God, don’t say it like that. I don’t think about you that way.” His eyes are wide and somehow she believes him. “I just… there’s no point ruling anything out, right? You want to watch me and him, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, despite herself. She’s starting to wonder whether it would be worth it. Some crazy emotional upheaval and in return for what? Nothing more than jerk off material for the rest of her life. Well, it could be worse. “Yeah,” she says, more softly now, and turns so she’s pressed against him. “You and me and him and her.” It makes sense, kind of. Her best friend and her kind of boyfriend and his ex kind of boyfriend. That could be so much love, right there. It’s definitely a mess as well, but she thinks she could probably work it out eventually. Worst case scenario, she’ll just get years of therapy, which was probably going to happen anyway with a life and a mom like hers. “Okay,” she says. His arms are tight around her waist now, his mouth inches from hers. “I think I could deal with that.”

“Good,” Zayn says, and leans in to kiss her. His mouth is typically intoxicating but her thoughts are butterflies, darting bright into the dark air around them. How much of her life could this fuck up? How many things could be destroyed? She feels like she should care more, or be more frightened, but the idea of Kendall darting so far out of her reach that she can’t get her back is unthinkable. Harry is whatever, Harry is an afterthought, and Zayn is – Zayn is like her in this way, apparently. Zayn wants to try it out and fuck the consequences. She kind of likes that, maybe more than she should. She feels like afterwards once the dust has settled and Kendall’s come back to her, things might be okay.

“You think Kendall would be into it?” Zayn asks. 

Her lipstick’s on his mouth, and she smudges it off with the edge of her thumb as she says, “She’s a big girl. She can say yes or no. It’s up to her. You think that the prospect of seeing me without a shirt on grosses her out that much?”

Zayn’s eyebrows draw together as he gazes at her. “Well, no,” he says, like it’s completely obvious. “Blatantly not, babe. Whether or not Kendall likes the sight of you naked is the least of our problems.” 

She isn’t sure if he’s complimenting her boobs or making some statement about Kendall that she doesn’t know if she should hear because it isn’t her business, so she ignores him, and grabs his hands, and pulls him back inside.

*

When they’re done eating and Harry and Zayn have bickered gently over the check before Gigi rolled her eyes and grabbed it off them, they go back to Zayn’s place. Harry’s quiet and calm beside her in the car on the way back, and in the front she can see the glow of Kendall’s phone as she checks her messages. On Gigi’s other side there’s Zayn, his thigh pressed against hers, nervous energy rolling off him as he twists in his seat to look out of the window, to find his phone in his pocket, to scratch the back of his shoulder. Gigi rests a hand on his knee and he looks at her and visibly calms before covering her hand with his own. She feels the heat of Harry’s gaze on their joined hands before he looks away again, out of the window and into the night.

When they get there, Kendall says “Sweet house,” and glances around the hallway interestedly before kicking off her heels and somehow working out where the living room is without having to ask, probably because of her extensive experiences of living in Californian mansions her whole life. Harry follows her and Gigi and Zayn follow right after. “Should I light a fire?” he asks.

Gigi raises her eyebrows. “Does that mean you’re asking me to?”

He laughs a bit. “Maybe.”

“He’s horrible at doing it,” she tells Harry and Kendall. “He would definitely not survive the apocalypse.”

“Wow, harsh,” Zayn says, and grabs her from behind, arms around her waist, firm and certain. She rests back against him and smiles over at Kendall, whose face is almost expressionless, eyebrow quirking just a little before she turns and makes her way over to the Christmas tree in the corner. “Hey, this is pretty,” she says, bending to look at the ornaments, a sparkly little globe, a little drum, a translucent dove. “I love this one.” There’s a little glass angel in the palm of her hand complete with golden wings.

It’s pretty much the only sign of festivity in Zayn’s house, and it appeared there midway through last week. Zayn never mentioned it, so Gigi kind of assumed it was the work of an overzealous assistant who wanted to stop him missing home too much, but instead he’s smiling, sincere and pleased as he wanders over to join Kendall next to it. “Yeah? Thanks. My mum sent that one over.”

“She did?” Gigi asks. “That’s nice.” 

“Yeah.” Zayn glances at her, almost defensive. “It’s no big deal.”

“I didn’t say it was a big deal,” she points out, and he shrugs.

“She’s pretty, though,” Kendall says. “The angel, I mean. Although I’m sure your mom is too.”

“His mum’s very pretty,” says Harry, with a smile that’s kind of dirty and gross.

“She’s nothing on Foxy Coxy,” Zayn says, and Harry screws up his nose and says, “Why, you little…” He mimes strangling someone and Zayn laughs and mimes choking, like it’s something they’ve done a million times before. Familiar footsteps, familiar patterns. It’s all falling back into place for them, which is obviously a great thing that Gigi’s happy about. That doesn’t stop it being weird, though, seeing years of history that she wasn’t a part of. She gets Zayn’s new life, mostly, but he’s made up of so much past that she doesn’t understand and maybe never will that it makes her feel a little awkward, as though she’s intruding.

“I remember this one,” Harry says abruptly, reaching upwards to one of the high branches, fingertips brushing over a small robin. “This was from your Princess Park tree, right?”

Zayn nods, and Kendall says “Princess Park?”

“When we started in the band we lived in this sort of estate,” Harry explains, “blocks of flats, really fancy ones, a couple of minutes away from each other. We all went out together that first year—”

“2011, I think,” Zayn puts in.

In 2011, Gigi was in high school. She remembers hearing about a new British boy band, she remembers _What Makes You Beautiful_ on all the radio stations. She remembers preferring Justin, actually. She definitely doesn’t remember ever zeroing in on any magazine covers and deciding that she’d be attempting a four way with the cute one and the curly one sometime in the future. That’s okay, though. Life is full of exciting twists and turns.

“—anyway, we all got trees for our flats. Me and Louis shared a flat back then…” Harry shakes his head, looking bewildered. “Weird. It feels like a really long time ago. And we all ordered decorations online and helped each other do our trees. Niall was last so—”

“—his one was a bit shit,” Zayn puts in, and the two of them look at each other and laugh. “It was my first real tree,” Zayn adds then, softly.

“Really?” Harry asks, caught halfway through a thought, smiling at Zayn like he’s spellbound.

“Really,” Zayn says. “At home we had this old fake one. My mum used to talk about it having branches like massive sausages. And then me and Perrie—”

“You had those huge trees, didn’t you?” Harry says. “Proper epic _Downton Abbey_ ones.”

“Do you still watch Downton?” Zayn asks. “Jesus.”

“I’m a bit behind on the most recent series,” Harry says, with great dignity.

“You,” Zayn says, with terrible affection, and bumps his hip against Harry’s. 

“My mom has trees like that,” Kendall says. “Huge ones. Multiple ones. I didn’t realise it was overkill for years until I started noticing other people’s houses. I only have one at my place but I haven’t decorated it yet. Kylie’s coming to help me.”

“Yeah? Nice. Perrie would never let me decorate our trees,” Zayn says, half-smiling. “Well. I’d help a bit. Pass her stuff. But then she’d shout at me for getting the fairy lights all wonky. We had all these boxes of decorations we ordered from John Lewis – you know, twenty identical gold glittery baubles, that stuff. I don’t know where they are now. In our loft, I suppose.”

“Haven’t you taken them out? I thought you were selling the house,” Harry says.

“I was going to,” Zayn says. “Dropped the asking price and everything. I took it off the market after a bit – I mean, I like it there. And no one was biting.”

“Maybe because the back garden’s more like a post-apocalyptic wasteland than a relaxing outdoor space,” Harry suggests.

“Could be,” Zayn agrees peacefully.

“Do you remember in the back shed—” Harry begins.

“Jesus, shut up, of course I do,” Zayn says, and Harry laughs, low and dirty. Zayn’s cheeks flare dusky red as he shakes his head, eyes on the floor. Next to them, Kendall shoots Gigi a delighted glance, eyes saucer-round, like her favourite characters on a TV show are on the verge of getting together. Gigi gets it, kind of.

More importantly, she gets alcohol. She goes to Zayn’s kitchen and finds her way around it because she’s been there before, she’s part of the life he’s built for himself here in LA. She takes through beers and another bottle of red wine but she leaves the hard liquor standing on the kitchen counter, because she doesn’t think that getting too wasted is a great idea. When she gets her next place, a bigger apartment or maybe even a house, she wants a beautiful old-fashioned bar, with a cooler full of ice and special tongs to drop it in people’s drinks, and sliced lemons and limes, and a cocktail shaker. Zayn usually just throws some Coke and whatever liquor he can find in a glass and he’s good to go. She doesn’t think she’s like that. She hands around bottles and pours wine, and watches as Zayn gets out rolling papers ready to skin up. Harry glances at him then and Zayn leaves the papers on the coffee table, untouched. Oh. So that’s a thing. 

She settles down next to Zayn and throws her legs across his lap, his arms resting on her bare shins. “So,” she says, leaning forward to push his hair off his forehead, “how long do I get you in LA? When do you go home for Christmas?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and catches the inside of her wrist with a kiss that makes her stomach fizz. “Soon, probably. I want a good amount of time there.”

“What about you?” Kendall asks Harry, and he looks almost shame-faced as he says, “Tomorrow, actually.”

“Tomorrow?” Zayn asks. The suddenness of his attention turning away from her is like a cold wind. “That’s soon.”

“Should have made up with me sooner then, shouldn’t you, Malik?” Harry says, with an easy smile. “Flight leaves at eleven. Home in time for a late dinner. I’m going to drive up to Cheshire the day after.”

“Nice,” Zayn says, looking like he doesn’t think it’s particularly nice at all. 

“I’m only going home for Christmas Eve until the 26th,” Kendall says. “Any more time there and I would probably die.”

“Is Tyga coming for Christmas?” Gigi asks, and laughs as Kendall makes a sickened face. 

“What are you doing for Christmas?” Harry asks Zayn then. “Your London wasteland?”

“My London winter wonderland,” Zayn says, and then admits, “No. Bradford. It’s different without…”

“Perrie,” Harry says. “Of course.”

“It’s going to be exciting having Christmas up there,” Zayn says. “More family. Better food. Her mum’s turkey was always fucking tasteless.”

“Butter,” Harry says, “under the skin.”

“Calm it, Nigella,” Zayn says, and smiles easily. “You should come and say hi.”

“It’s a long drive,” Harry says.

“So?” Zayn says.

“Valid point,” Harry says, and the two of them look at each other for a long moment before Zayn cracks first, letting out this little, warm laugh, the sides of his nose crinkling as he looks down at Gigi’s legs on his lap, tracing a pattern across her calf with his fingertip. “Maybe I will, then,” Harry says, like he’s testing the waters.

“Maybe you will,” Zayn says, and then looks at Gigi. “Babe. What are you doing for Christmas?”

“Are you going to invite me to your house like Harry?” Gigi asks with acid in her voice, and smiles to soften the blow. “I don’t know. Either LA or New York or maybe Aspen. I wish my mom would make up her mind but this year’s weird since my mom and stepdad split up. So.” She shrugs.

“Yeah,” Kendall chips in. “Family changes are tough.”

And it’s weird, kind of, that Zayn totally talks the talk and walks the walk, Gigi knows he was poor once upon a time and that people have said horrible racist and Islamophobic things to him and that being mixed race is definitely not easy at all, but she still thinks that there’s a certain innocence and beauty to having a mom and dad who still love each other. She thinks sometimes, at holidays and on birthdays, that that’s something she would give up a whole lot of the rest of her life for. She looks across at Kendall’s suddenly sombre face and thinks that maybe she would agree. 

“It’s hard,” Harry says, “splitting your time between families. I get that. Trying to keep everyone happy.”

“Harry likes to keep everyone happy,” Zayn says.

“Nothing wrong with that,” Harry says, a little edge to his voice. “Better than not keeping them happy.”

Zayn narrows his eyes a little. “What’s your point?”

There’s a silence, before: “No point,” Harry says, running his thumb around the rim of his wine glass. It sings out a faint, whining note. 

Across the room Kendall catches Gigi’s eye and raises an eyebrow questioningly. Gigi shrugs a shoulder. She’s starting to feel a little done with all this back and forth. Either this tug and pull’s going to go on all night or they’re going to get down to a little action, a way more interesting version of tug and pull. That would be vastly preferable to their current minefield, with Zayn’s stubborn bottom lip and Harry’s little upset frown. She says briskly, “So, Harry, I don’t know you that well. Is there anything about Zayn you want to tell me? Anything – you know.” She smiles, sweet and coquettish in a way that makes Harry look at her a little harder. “That you feel I should know.”

“Basically,” Zayn puts in, “she’s being a nosy little perv.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Harry says pleasantly. He stares at Zayn for a moment, jaw flexing and unflexing again. “I don’t know what I should say. Zayn’s always been lovely.”

“Once Harry had a threesome on the tour bus on the sofas,” Zayn says. “He didn’t even shut the curtains. The rest of us were in our bunks like…” He makes a ridiculous face, a huge, forced, awkward smile.

“Oh, is that your game?” Harry asks. “Dishing the dirt on me? How dare you, Zayn Malik?”

Zayn shrugs, hand curling around Gigi’s leg. “Sue me.”

“Maybe I will,” Harry says, and then adds, “Once Zayn had sex in a car park and someone took pictures of his bum and he gave her fifty quid to delete them off her phone.”

“I had actually forgotten that,” Zayn says contemplatively. “It was nice living in a world where I’d forgotten that.”

“You want me to give up some dirt on you?” Kendall asks Gigi. Her smile’s wide and amused, like she knows she’s totally in the clear here. What an asshole. What a squeaky clean bleached asshole. 

“You don’t have any dirt on me,” Gigi says sternly. “I’ve never done anything gross in my whole life.”

“Unless Zayn suggested it?” Harry says, and when she raises an eyebrow he says, “What? It’s his track record.”

“So he convinced you to do some dirty things back in 1D days?” Gigi asks. “Please elaborate.” She smirks over at him, and honestly: she does want to know this. Despite the weirdness there’s part of her that’s aching to hear it and to have it in her head to think about, to come back to when whatever guy she’s banging isn’t quite hitting it right. She wants to think about the two of them because they’re beautiful, okay? Zayn’s one of the hottest guys she’s ever seen and Harry has his charms; he’s better-looking in person and in motion with the sharpness of his jawline and the knowingness of his eyes and the deliberation with which he lands his words, his thoughtful way of talking and the strength in his hands. She wants to think of them on Zayn’s hipbones. She wants to think about Zayn giving himself over, about him losing himself for once in his life.

“We used to share hotel rooms,” Zayn says unexpectedly, and it seems less gross now than when Gigi heard it earlier. She gets it more. Their magnetic pull. “We’d invite girls up. More than one, sometimes.”

“How does that even work?” Kendall asks. “Like… one in the… and one in the…” She makes a hand gesture that’s so vague it’s almost even more lewd. 

“Any way,” Harry says, eyes on Zayn. “We’d just work it out. Whatever felt best.”

“And sometimes without the girls,” Gigi prompts him.

“And sometimes without the girls,” Harry confirms, slow and thoughtful. 

“Hot,” Kendall says with absolute conviction.

“Yeah?” Zayn says.

“Extremely hot,” Gigi says. “I don’t know why guys are always so fucking surprised when girls think that, when all you do is sit around all day whacking it to lesbians.”

“That’s not all we do,” Harry says. “Sometimes we get up and go to make a cup of tea before coming back and start on the next Blonde Twins XXX video.”

“Sometimes we even make ourselves some beans on toast,” Zayn agrees.

“Beans on toast? Ugh,” Kendall says.

“I hate having to fight every American about this,” Zayn says, looking world weary. 

“It isn’t our fault you guys are gross,” Kendall says. 

They’re getting off topic, which is unacceptable. “So have you ever thought about doing it again?” Gigi asks, because she’s nothing if not forthright.

Harry raises an eyebrow very slightly and says, “Bit hard to arrange casual threesomes when your former bandmates accidentally on purpose lose your number.” 

Beside Gigi Zayn squints a bit, like he’s looking into space or posing at some kind of lameass teenage angst photo shoot. “If you’d DM’d me on Twitter,” he says after a moment, “we could have figured something out,” and across the room Harry laughs, low and sincere.

“That’s how he used to arrange all his old hook ups,” he tells them. “He was gross.”

“You love it when I’m gross,” Zayn says, and Harry says, with a filthy smile, “Maybe.”

Zayn puts music on after that. He tries to put on The Weeknd and then Gigi points out she overheard him banging her little sister a few times so the vibe isn’t really right. Then he puts on something she doesn’t know instead, a little strange and eclectic sounding and electronic. The kind of thing that would probably make people think she’s pretty cool if she played it in her car with her windows down, even though most of the time she likes to drive to Katy Perry or Jason Derulo, or the Grease movie soundtrack when there’s a lot of traffic so she can dance in her seat as much as she likes. It’s low and the beat is sweet and persistent and when Zayn sits down again he puts an arm across her shoulders. She sinks into him, bowing to him and his warmth and solidity, the familiar scent of his cologne mixed with the tomatoes and garlic from the open kitchen of the restaurant they were at. He smells like someone she could come home to, if things turn out differently than she’s starting to suspect they will.

Harry asks Zayn about his album, and Zayn’s face lights up. Gigi loves it when he talks about shit like this, how he uses his eloquent hands in the most gorgeous way, and the way he actually wants to talk for once, instead of sitting lost in his own head. She thinks it’s probably pretty interesting in there, but it doesn’t make for great over-dinner conversation. She tells Harry, “What I’ve heard of it sounds great,” and Harry smiles over at Zayn and says, “Maybe you can give me a preview too.”

“Maybe I can,” Zayn says, and next to Harry Kendall chips in, “Me too! Tonight?”

“Another time,” Zayn says, making a face. “Too much pressure.”

Instead he turns this music up instead and leans in to talk to Gigi, murmuring in her ear about how good she looks and how much he’s been looking at her and wanting her all evening. _That’s a lie,_ she wants to say, _I wasn’t the one you were looking at_ , but she doesn’t, of course, because then he kisses her. She forgets where they are: it’s the wine and the music and the feel of his mouth on hers, it’s his hands on her sides, strong and capable. _I got you, babe_ , he’d said on their second date, when she’d almost missed a step and he’d put an arm around her waist to hold her up. She trusted him then, but she doesn’t know if she should trust him now. She wants to. God, she wants to. She kisses him and tastes success and longing and smoke and wine on his tongue, his hands all over her, her fingers tangled in his bleach-soft hair. _We could have been something_. As though it’s already over.

He pulls her towards him with a grunt and drags her down onto his lap. Across the room, Harry and Kendall are quiet, and when Gigi looks down and into Zayn’s eyes she sees him glancing past her. She follows his gaze to Harry, to his clever, interested face, his wide green eyes and his thoughtful mouth, and then she looks at Kendall. There’s something frozen on her face, something awed, and Gigi smiles at her, slow. She doesn’t know what makes her do it, God knows, but slowly she unbuttons the front of her dress, eyes still on Kendall’s. She twists her hair over one shoulder so her back’s bare, and edges the straps of her dress down, slips her arms out of them. Kendall’s lips are slightly parted. Good. She can feel Zayn’s gaze on her, his hands on her tits, pulling down the cups of her bra a little, his beard rough on her skin as he leans in to touch with his hands and then his mouth. She touches his hair, triumphant like she’s won something, knotting her fingers in it, and feels Zayn’s mouth warm against her collarbone.

“Kendall,” Harry says, and leans in to brush hair off her face. Kendall leans towards him like a flower to the sun, like she’s aching for something he might be able to give her, her sweep of dark hair gleaming like there are fairy lights braided into it, her swanlike neck long and elegant. She’s a picture that’s worth more than a thousand words: she’s a portrait, a delicacy, a nuance, an answer. Gigi wants to fall into this dream and look at her forever. The uncertainty of her mouth and the beauty of her brow and the awkwardness of her long legs and the sweet fragility of her smile, finally, as Harry draws her close. He kisses her like he’s talking to her, like he’s asking her if it’s okay, and she kisses him back, long fingers threading through his unruly mess of hair. _It’s fine_ , Gigi sees her body say, and as she moves closer to him, _It’s good._

There probably isn’t any boy in the world you could feel safer with than Harry Styles. Gigi knows that even as she looks down into Zayn’s eyes. She doesn’t know if he’d break her heart on purpose, or if he’s even capable of it. She doesn’t intend to let him, she knows that much at least. She kisses him instead, lets him unzip the rest of her dress. Part of her worries that it’s hanging off her all shapeless like some shitty old sack before she slips it off completely, but also: whatever. He touches her bare back with her fingertips and she arches it, leans in to kiss him, undoing his shirt buttons, dragging her nails down his bare chest.

There’s a shuffle and Kendall lets out a noise that’s half shriek and half laugh, and then there’s a thud from next to them as Harry and Kendall collapse onto their couch too. “We were getting lonely,” Harry explains, rearranging Kendall on top of himself, running his hands over her lean thighs in her jeans. Kendall’s arms are loose around his neck and she’s smiling, sincere and bright, meeting Gigi’s gaze for a moment. _What are we doing_ , her eyes laugh, and Gigi shakes her head just a little. They’re going crazy, they’re being stupid, they’re acknowledging the fact that they’re twenty years old and make mistakes every day because that’s what they’re supposed to do. They’re praying this won’t be one of the mistakes that lasts forever. Gigi doesn’t know if she’s supposed to reach out and touch Kendall or not, so she looks down at Zayn again for guidance, but he isn’t focused on her, which she probably shouldn’t be surprised by. He has that little smile licking around the corners of his mouth, and his eyes are on Harry’s, years of understanding and familiarity between them.

“Hey, bitch,” Gigi says, and reaches out to turn his face back to her. “I’m right here.”

“And they’re right there,” Zayn says, a little breathless as she lets go of his chin. “Aren’t you a bit distracted too?”

Gigi turns to look at Harry, his sea-green eyes and his jaw, cut sharp and precise like a diamond, his wild tangle of hair that she wouldn’t mind touching. He raises an eyebrow at her speculatively. For some reason, she can’t force herself to look at Kendall but she can feel uncertainty radiating off her in waves now. Gigi decides to save her, to save them both. “So what do we do?” she asks. “Do me and Kendall switch so I make out with that guy?”

“‘That guy’,” Harry says, sounding tickled. “Fantastic.”

“You can do what you want, babe,” Zayn says. His hand’s on her thigh now, right on the inside of it, stroking so high that he can probably feel heat coming from her pussy. She wishes he’d shift his fingers a little, wishes he’d slip them inside her panties and touch her. She can see him half-hard in his jeans and next to them Harry’s pupils are blown. She wants a little friction, because want is pulsing through her and she’s starting to get it confused with need.

“Well,” Gigi says, because bluntness works best with stupid boys, “I wanna get fucked, for sure.”

“Don’t we all?” Harry says, and Kendall snorts, surprised, like she wasn’t quite expecting that.

“That could be arranged,” Zayn says, fingers moving higher, pressing at her through her panties, way too gentle. She wants to roll her hips down, wants more, more, more. Then Zayn says, softer now, sweeter and more sincere, “Kendall, you all right?”

“Yeah,” Kendall says, “I mean – yeah. Totally.”

Gigi turns to look at her. Zayn’s hand is still now, resting on Gigi’s thigh like she’s a table. Awesome. She always wanted to be furniture. Kendall’s eyes are wide and blank, and she’s red-faced, her hair staticky and a little crazy-looking. “Are you okay?” Gigi asks her.

“Absolutely. Just – I should freshen up,” Kendall says, and hops off Harry’s lap with a sort of awkward grace that makes her look like a not quite grown mountain goat who’s still getting used to its legs. She half-runs to the door and into the hallway, and Zayn mutters, “Do you think she’s got the shits?”

Harry almost falls over sideways laughing, and Gigi scowls and shoves at Zayn’s chest. “God, you’re such a jackass,” she says, climbing off him, wrapping her open dress around herself. “I can’t believe you’re such a jackass.”

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me here with this,” Zayn says, gesturing at his crotch, and Gigi can absolutely tell that it’s just a joke. She can tell that he’s just being silly, that he isn’t especially bothered or upset, and she knows that blue balls just make him rearrange himself politely before wandering into another room to jerk off. She knows that he’s cool and sweet and that he would never be intentionally hurtful or insensitive, but right now she still definitely wants to push him off a cliff.

She exhales, forcing a smile. “I’m not leaving you alone, babe,” she says, and watches Zayn’s cheeks burn darker than Kendall’s did as he looks sideways at Harry, before turning on her heel and leaving the room.

Kendall’s standing in Zayn’s kitchen, as it turns out. She’s drinking apple juice from the bottle – which probably isn’t the best idea because Gigi’s seen Zayn do the exact same thing multiple times – and looking down at her phone in a flustered way. “Oh,” she says, when she sees Gigi. “Hey. I just…” She messes with her phone for a moment longer and then she looks up again and laughs. “You know when you feel awkward and you want to look at your phone for a moment so you text someone for no reason? You’re usually my person that I text. And tonight you’re here so I couldn’t. And so I opened up my messages to Kylie, and my group chat with my sisters, and my messages with Hailey, and I just…”

“It’s pretty awkward,” Gigi agrees. “What do you say? ‘About to have a four way with two members of One Direction! I hope you’re having a great Sunday!’?”

“Actually, Hailey might appreciate that,” Kendall says.

“Hailey would absolutely appreciate that,” Gigi says. “Selena, too.”

“Selena hates me.”

“Selena does not hate you.”

“Selena does hate me.” Kendall messes with her phone for a moment longer before setting it back onto Zayn’s worktop. “And Taylor hates me.”

“Taylor doesn’t hate you either,” Gigi says, although she thinks she might. Taylor hates a lot of people, and covers it up with red lipstick and four thousand dollar birthday gifts and boat ride double dates down the Thames even though Gigi had spent the previous night fucking Taylor’s ex-boyfriend.

“She does, because of the show, and because of… I think because of Justin? Because he was with Selena.” Kendall makes a face. “Which makes no sense because I didn’t even…”

“If she hates you,” Gigi says firmly, “then she can go fuck herself.”

“She doesn’t hate _you_ ,” Kendall says.

“So? You’re my priority,” Gigi tells her.

Kendall’s eyes are on her, dark and thoughtful. She puts the apple juice bottle down onto the counter beside her phone. “Thank you,” she says, finally. She’s leaning against the worktop and there’s something about the line of her waist and hip that Gigi wants to look at and to map with her hands. That curve, the hard ridge of her hipbone, the lean softness and warmth of her body. What does her skin smell like, anyway? The soft gold down on her stomach. The feeling of her long fingers, delicate and beautiful, pushing through Gigi’s hair. “So, tonight, huh?”

“Yeah,” Gigi says. She wrinkles her nose, pulling her open dress more tightly closed around her body. “Tonight.” She gives Kendall a space to speak in, like she does with Zayn, but she doesn’t say anything. Clearly she isn’t as easily trainable as he is, her actions aren’t as easy to foresee. “Are you okay with what’s going on?”

“Oh, sure,” Kendall says, sounding casual in the same on-a-knife-edge way that she had every time she got asked about her dad’s transition for a while. “Did you, um…” She frowns, and looks down. “Did you plan it?”

“Did me and Zayn say ‘Let’s get Kendall and Harry into an orgy’? No,” Gigi says. “But I mean, it isn’t the worst consequence of a reunion dinner. And like we were saying before: they miss each other.”

“Maybe we should just leave them to whatever they want to do,” Kendall suggests. “We could go out to get some frozen yogurt.”

“Are you crazy? Zayn might be about to suck a dick in there. I need to see that! This is not the time for snacks, Kendall!” Gigi says, and okay, part of her is joking, but most of her absolutely is not.

Kendall stares at her and then she cracks up, snorts in a way that makes her ugly and sweet at the same time, and then she says “As your best friend, I can’t hold you back from this once in a lifetime opportunity. I just… is it too weird? Maybe I could go get some ice cream by myself.”

“Kendall Jenner goes on solo ice cream trip at night,” Gigi says. “Sources say she’s pathetic and lonely.”

“Good point,” Kendall concedes. “Maybe I could grab a book and chill out. Or I could watch TV while you guys are doing whatever you want to do. I mean, _Friends_ is always on.”

“It is,” Gigi agrees. There’s something swooping downwards in her stomach, pathetic and despairing. _I want you there_ , she wants to say. _I want to be with you as well. Those boys don’t need to be there at all_ , which, okay, that’s a revolutionary thought and maybe one she should be paying attention to.

“You think it’s gonna be, like, them doing it on the bed and you in a corner sneaking pictures with your hand in your pants as you try not to distract them?” Kendall asks innocently.

“Literally shut the fuck up,” Gigi says, and finds herself laughing then, sincere and real, stupid and almost hysterical. Kendall’s laughing too, wicked and lovely and God, fuck, God, she’s the most beautiful thing that Gigi’s ever seen. It’s only a couple of steps round to the other side of the counter and it takes nothing at all for Gigi to put her hand on that curve of Kendall’s waist, to shift smoothly into her space, for their mouths to touch. Kendall’s lips are sticky from apple juice, from chocolate, from wine, and Gigi feels like every one of her cells is aching to pour itself into Kendall’s, to press their bodies together, to close every gap. She just wants her. She just _wants_ her. And Kendall kisses her back, harder than Gigi could ever have expected, pressing against her, arms around her shoulders, a sharp press of teeth on Gigi’s bottom lip before their mouths open. Gigi feels her body pulse, the deepest arousal, more want than she knows what to do with. She turns and presses Kendall back against the counter, kissing harder now, messy with need. God, this is everything. This is what her mom told her to be careful of, this is the most important love in her life, this is Kendall choosing her in every way. Her best friend. The biggest corner of her heart.

She feels Kendall’s fingertips on her skin, almost tentative, skating across her stomach, and Gigi’s breath catches in her throat. “Gi?” Kendall mumbles, and Gigi says, “It’s okay, you have cold hands,” and Kendall’s forehead is resting against hers as she says, “Sorry.” A lock of her smooth silky hair is between Gigi’s fingers. 

“Kissing you is different from kissing boys,” Gigi says, stupid with it all, with want and with Kendall and with shock. With dull awareness that maybe she shouldn’t be shocked at all.

“I know,” Kendall says. She pulls away just a little. Gigi wants to say _Don’t go_ , but holds the words back. “Girls are different,” Kendall adds. “I mean, I…” She takes a breath, bites her lip, glances away. “Yeah. Girls are different.”

“Fireworks?” Gigi asks. _Here? With me?_

“Fireworks,” Kendall says, with the tiniest smile. Gigi hurts with love for her: her shy eyes and her uncertain just-kissed mouth and her gentle hands. Zayn has gentle hands too, when he wants to, but they’re nothing like Kendall’s.

“Cool,” Gigi says. She leans in and kisses Kendall again. She wants to say so many things that she doesn’t have the words for, but she doesn’t get time, because Kendall disentangles herself gently and Gigi steps aside to let her pass because of course she does, that’s what friends do.

“I’m okay with this,” Kendall says quietly. “I mean, the four of us.”

Gigi feels Kendall’s eyes on her then, her open dress, her bared underwear. It makes her whole body heat up with pleasure. “Good. Me too,” she says, and when she turns to move back to Zayn’s living room, she trusts that Kendall will follow her.

*

In the living room Zayn and Harry are kissing, which is a surprise to absolutely no one. It’s beautiful, in a weird kind of way. Harry’s on top and he’s shirtless now and Gigi can see the muscles working in his back, one hand curled around the side of Zayn’s face as they kiss, deep and wet and a little filthy. She can see Harry moving his hips, rhythmic and grinding, and Zayn’s hand tight on his waist guiding him, his other hand tangled in Harry’s dumb tangled hair. As they watch she sees Zayn’s hand drop from Harry’s hip, sees it move over his back, all lean tan muscle. Zayn’s touching him like he knows him well. Gigi wonders how many times they’ve done it before. Hundreds, maybe. Forever. 

She considers coughing pointedly and ignoring the fact that what they’re doing is extremely fucking hot, but Harry turns around then, out of breath, his mouth red and spit-slick. She wonders, for a moment, what that mouth would look like after it’s been wrapped around a dick. Probably similar. Maybe a little more bruised. She likes the thought of it. Part of her wants to look at Kendall but she feels like hearts and butterflies and songbirds might start appearing around her if she does, like in a really horrible Disney cartoon. Instead she says, “Hey, boys. I’m glad you kept yourselves busy while we were gone.”

“We’re very resourceful,” Harry says, and Zayn lets out a low laugh, almost disbelieving and entirely affectionate, resting his forehead on Harry’s shoulder for a moment. Harry looks at Kendall then, and his face softens. “Kendall, you all right?”

“I’m great,” Kendall says. She sounds brighter now, more sparkling, more everything. “I’m really great.”

“Good.” Harry detaches himself from Zayn – who looks awesome, okay, just sitting there. Like a fucking king in his throne, waiting for his loyal subjects to come fellate him. He looks flushed and golden and regal and messy in a gorgeous way. Gigi sneaks him a smile, and he beams back, his nose crinkling at the top. His jeans are open, which means Harry was probably touching him. She is entirely unsurprised by that.

And Harry himself: he looks like Tarzan, or at least George of the fucking jungle, all wild hair and lean torso and stupid tattoos and long legs in skinny jeans going on forever. Harry looks like the sort of person that could make himself comfortable anywhere, like he could recline on a grand piano while having champagne poured lovingly over his chest and chocolate-covered strawberries placed in his mouth and an hour later he could be sitting down next to a homeless guy in an alleyway somewhere to tell him that his dog’s very sweet and to ask him if he’s enjoying his book. Zayn isn’t like that. He’s cool, sometimes self-consciously so, but he doesn’t hide his sharp edges as well as Harry does. “Hey,” Harry says to Kendall, and she turns his face up to his just a fraction, and they kiss. Gigi feels a flaring of something in her stomach at that. Jealousy would be stupid. Jealousy is all wrong. She’s about to ditch her dress and crawl into Zayn’s lap in her panties and bra, but then Harry stops kissing Kendall and turns to her instead.

It would probably be rude to refuse.

Kissing Harry Styles is a million little girls’ dreams come true. It’s something that Gigi’s kind of boyfriend did for years, something that almost broke his heart in the end. It’s something that she doesn’t think she’ll ever do again after tonight, but right now? Right now, God, it’s good. It isn’t shooting stars the way it was with Kendall but Harry kisses well, firm and strong and with a faint edge of danger, like he wouldn’t have any problem throwing Gigi over his shoulder and then onto a bed before ravishing her like an old-school hero. She likes that in a guy, because apparently her standards are stuck way back on her mom’s old romance novel shelf that she rampaged through when she was eleven.

She’s so caught up in kissing Harry Styles that she doesn’t notice Kendall and Zayn. When she opens her eyes again she sees them together, side by side on the couch, kissing like old friends. Gigi can see smiles darting around on the corners of their mouths, like they’re a fraction of a second away from a full-scale giggling meltdown. Gigi feels like maybe she doesn’t need to watch out for them right now because they’re doing just fine by themselves, so she kisses Harry again instead. This time after a moment she feels his hands on her, pushing her dress to the floor, touching her bare back and her shoulders and, for a moment, her butt. The touch of his fingertips is fast and bright like dragonflies. She likes it.

She likes it even more when she feels Harry’s hands on her stomach and then on her tits, cupping the left one – her favourite, actually – in his big hand, thumb pressing against her nipple, and she feels it then, like her whole body’s shivering and shaking towards his, like she’d let him take her over if he wanted to. From behind Harry there’s a shriek of laughter and she breaks away to see Kendall’s bare legs, her jeans on the floor and a bright smile on her face, and Zayn’s tattooed hands on her thighs. 

Harry presses his lips against the side of her face for a moment and then he says, with a scratch of stubble and soft skin against her face, “Shall we?”

“Not as long as you’re still wearing pants, Styles,” she tells him. 

“These jeans are going to be very undignified to take off,” Harry says.

“You should have thought of that before you decided to have group sex,” she says, and unbuttons them to get him started, because she is a help and a delight. Behind him Zayn and Kendall are together. She’s flat on her back on the couch and he’s walking two fingers down her chest, her clavicle, between her tits, down across her flat belly. “That tickles,” Kendall says, and arches her back a little, one of her hands on the back of Zayn’s neck. Gigi could swear that just a moment ago she was still wearing jeans and the off-the-shoulder sweater that Gigi couldn’t stop looking at, but of all people she’s aware that Zayn’s pretty fast at getting people naked. There’s a lot of his skin out too now, broad shoulders, sweet stupid chicken legs. “I want to see your tattoos,” Kendall says to him, and Zayn turns over his arms for her so she can trace them with her fingertips. She finds the one of Perrie and touches her inked hair and says, “Do you regret it?”

“No,” Zayn says, glancing down at it. “I’ll always have been in love with her, even if I’m not any more.”

“You could get it changed to Gigi’s face,” Kendall says, and smirks, because she’s a little asshole.

“Or yours,” Zayn says to Kendall, refusing to take the bait.

“Or mine,” Harry says. His eyes are crinkling in the corners as he looks at Zayn and smiles, approaching him now, slow and steady. 

“Maybe,” Zayn says. “I like your new tiger.” He stretches out a hand and curls it around Harry’s thigh. “Sick.”

“Thanks,” Harry says. Kendall’s between the two of them, still on her back on the couch, Zayn half-sprawled behind her. Her underwear is extremely cute. Gigi doesn’t know if that’s the right thing to be noticing right now. Maybe that’s something that she would enjoy if she was with girls more often – or ever, apart from right now. Beautiful underwear, jewel coloured silk. Lace and pink and green and blue and red. Or black, like Kendall’s right now. Cute lace French panties, and a not-quite-matching bra that Gigi remembers seeing her strip off before the VS show, when they were both nervous and starving and exhausted and half-shaking with pre-emptive stage fright. 

Zayn unfolds himself from the couch and Gigi goes to him, and then they’re together, limbs tangled, kissing like they always do, sweet and hard and certain. She makes sure his boxers are gone and opens her legs for him and he touches her, and she arches up into him before rolling, pushing, straddling him. He’s half out of breath and his kiss is desperate and even though he frowns as she pulls away from him, his face clears as she drops to her knees in front of him. God, she loves his dick. Full and thick and cut and clean. She likes the way he tastes, which hasn’t been the case with every guy she’s ever been with. She takes in as much as she can and sucks hard and he touches her hair a little too hard, the way he always does. Beside them, Harry’s kissing his way down Kendall’s stomach. Gigi knows what comes next. Kendall smiles at her, eyes hooded, one hand in Harry’s hair as he pushes her panties to one side and his face vanishes between her legs. And God, Gigi – the base of Zayn’s dick is in her fist and her mouth’s stretched around the top of it but it suddenly seems wrong, it seems—

No. She pulls back – her mouth makes the most satisfying noise ever as she pulls off, and Zayn’s looking down at her like she personally betrayed him, but none of that matters. “Harry,” she gasps, “switch with me.”

Kendall has to tap Harry on the shoulder to get him to look up, because apparently that’s how engrossing he finds pussy, but when he does he just blinks before almost shouldering Gigi out of the way in his rush to get to Zayn’s dick. And it’s actually a little lovely, the way the boys are together, the way Harry looks up at Zayn reverently, the way Zayn touches the side of Harry’s face like he never thought he’d get him like this again. Harry presses his cheek to the inside of Zayn’s thigh like a blessing, and meanwhile Gigi has shit to be getting on with. She looks into Kendall’s eyes and commands her, a little shaky, “Take off your panties.”

“Take off _your_ panties,” Kendall counters.

“You drive a hard bargain,” Gigi tells her, and they laugh, which makes it – she doesn’t want to say ‘less weird’, because it actually isn’t all that weird, but it makes it easier. Like they’re hanging out at Kendall’s apartment reading French _Vogue_ and eating blueberries, like they’re going shopping for Kendall’s brother’s birthday gift and laughing at the ugly shirts and mirrored sunglasses in the horrible surf shop he likes to go to. Kendall’s her best friend. Her love for Kendall extends way past shopping and _Vogue_ and late night phone calls from Japan when she’s lonely and alone – which are two distinct things, Gigi has discovered lately. Her love for Kendall is this too. It’s the way Kendall wriggles out of her underwear and her gaze on Gigi’s body as she strips down, it’s the want there that’s mixed with love. Gigi doesn’t know if she even loved Cody this much. That’s a big deal.

She cocks her hip a little and pouts down at Kendall and Kendall says, “This is not the time to demonstrate your Miss California credentials.”

“I’d be so great at it,” Gigi says, and Kendall laughs. Gigi looks at her then, really looks; her small breasts, dusky pink nipples. The dark hair between her legs, a small neat triangle, which she must have grown back since the VS show, when they both got waxed to within an inch of their lives. Gigi’s still bare. She hopes that’s okay. 

“You’d be perfect,” Kendall says. “So—”

“You want me to…” _Carry on where Harry left off,_ Gigi kind of wants to say, but she doesn’t. Instead she wets her lips a little. Nerves are flooding through her stomach. She doesn’t think she knows how to do that.

“Have you ever before?” Kendall asks, and Gigi shakes her head. “Well. No,” Kendall says, and reaches out, and grabs Gigi’s hand, and pulls her down. “Another time,” she breathes into Gigi’s ear, and then she kisses her again. She feels like heaven. The elegant curves of her, all rise and fall and easy grace. The beauty of her collarbone and the softness of her skin. _Girls feel better than guys_ , Gigi realises. She feels like it’s the kind of thing she should have figured out a long time ago; she’s grateful to Kendall for showing her now. They kiss, and behind Kendall she can see Harry and Zayn. Harry’s on Zayn’s lap now, and she can hear noises he’s making, low breaths, and Zayn’s hand is – right. Okay. It’s there. Well, Gigi always knew he was into butt stuff. Kendall doesn’t seem to be into butt stuff; not now, anyway, with her hands on Gigi’s back and waist and tits and tangling in her hair, gentle and hard at the same time, like she’s certain in a way Gigi doesn’t think she’s ever seen from her before. She touches Kendall’s tit and she feels like she’s being clumsy, she feels like she doesn’t know shit, but Kendall gasps a little as Gigi rubs her thumb over her nipple. Her skin’s so soft, like silk. Gigi has no idea how she gets it that soft. She needs to ask what body moisturiser she uses.

She kisses down Kendall’s neck, which smells of sweet perfume and tastes almost chemical. There’s a tang of her underneath that though, the scent of her skin. “You smell so good,” Gigi murmurs, nose pressed against the hollow in Kendall’s throat, and Kendall gasps out, “Thanks. It’s Chanel.”

“No,” Gigi tells her, although she’s going to find out which Chanel and spray it into her underwear drawer so all her underwear smells of Kendall. “You. Just you. You smell good.” 

“Oh,” Kendall says, sounding overwhelmed, and then she says, “Fuck,” when Gigi scratches her right boob lightly with her teeth. She kind of likes it herself, which is why she did it, but she wasn’t especially expecting Kendall’s reaction; the sudden jerk, the open legs, and it only seems right to press her hand between them, exploring Kendall’s velvet skin, her wetness, her heat. “Oh my God,” Kendall says, her eyes shut. “Oh my God.” 

“I love the way you feel,” Gigi murmurs against her skin. “You’re so fucking hot. How do I…” She moves her hand.

“Like you do to yourself,” Kendall says. Her hands are up now, over her face, their heels pressed over her eyes. “Oh my God. Just do what you do to yourself.”

“I usually use a vibrator,” Gigi says, and feels Kendall’s muscles tense. God, she’s actually turned on. Gigi’s turning her best friend on. She feels like this is what every love story was written about, except maybe _Romeo and Juliet_. She and Kendall would never do anything as dumb as them. They’re just going to do this forever instead without any of the suicide bullshit. Fucking forever is a lot better than death. She moves her hand and feels her way, feels the slick wet heat, finds her clit – “Oh my God, oh my God,” Kendall says, her hips jerking upwards – and finds her opening and presses her fingers inside her. Slicker, hotter, tighter. Jesus. Gigi can feel herself tensing, can feel herself getting wetter. She feels like she should apologise to Zayn and his couch. She glances up over the perfect ridge of Kendall’s breast and looks for him. The boys have changed position now and all she can see is the slow movement of Zayn’s shoulders. She doesn’t know what they’re doing. Fucking, maybe. She doesn’t care, not when there’s the unmapped, gorgeous world of Kendall’s body to explore. The roundness of her tits and the valley of her belly button and the soft firmness of her pubic mound and the lips of her cunt and the sweet, beautiful flesh of her inner thighs, smooth as silver and creamy as heaven. Gigi pushes her fingers deeper inside her, gentle, and Kendall’s legs fall open more. “Yes,” she says. “Yeah, like… could you…” 

“Could I…?” Gigi asks.

Kendall’s hand comes down, presses against her clit. She’s looking down at Gigi now, her cheeks flushed, her eyes full of starlight. “Like this. Like, both together.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah.” 

“And harder.”

“So you like getting fucked.”

“Not by everyone.” Kendall throws her a smile that’s a smirk, somehow.

“Just by girls.”

“Today, just by you.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You should be.”

“I know. There are two members of One Direction over there and they’re in high demand.”

Kendall screws up her nose dismissively. “I think they’re busy anyway.”

Gigi laughs against her stomach and glances up. “Want me to tell you what’s happening?”

“Not especially.” 

“That’s a good answer.” Zayn’s mouth is on Harry’s neck now, and his fingers are inside him, and he’s fucking him slowly with them. Gigi watches as Harry touches Zayn’s forehead, makes him look up, makes him kiss him. They kiss like they know each other well, like they spent years practising. It’s intimate and lovely. Harry’s legs are pushed back and he’s so vulnerable that it almost hurts and he’s pulling Zayn down to him. “I thought,” Gigi hears him say, “I thought I lost you.” Zayn mumbles something against Harry’s mouth that she doesn’t quite hear and she’s glad about that somehow. They should have something for themselves. 

She has this, after all. She has Kendall and her beauty and her love right here in front of her. She has her velvet and silk, she has her breathy moans and how responsive she is, how she says “That’s so good. You’re so good,” when Gigi twists her wrist, she has her mouth and her everything. When Kendall comes, Gigi feels like the world might fall apart. She feels like she might shatter. She feels like she’s so turned on that she might never walk again. She might just have to lie on Zayn’s couch until she dies and pay gigolos to service her every day of her life. Or, alternatively, she could just do this. She removes her hand and sucks her fingers clean, and likes it, the sweet saltiness. It tastes better than guys’ come. Maybe that’s Kendall. Maybe that’s just girls in general. Another thing that she probably shouldn’t be surprised by. 

Kendall’s pink and panting. “Whoa,” she says, blinking.

“Eloquent,” Gigi says, and Kendall says, “Shut up,” and pulls her down to kiss her. 

“You want me to…”

“Okay,” Gigi says, wanting it suddenly, wanting it desperately with an urgency that surprise. “Yeah. I want you to…”

“Gi,” Zayn says, which kind of pisses on their parade.

“Yeah,” she says, distracted, eyes still on Kendall’s, thinking about her hands, her long fingers. Her pink, perfect mouth. “Yeah?”

“You said you wanted to…” He isn’t touching Harry now, his fingers aren’t inside him any more. Instead they’re pretty much both looking over at the other couch that Gigi and Kendall are on, looking surprisingly inquisitive and polite considering they both have huge boners. “You said you wanted to join in. Make this a four way…”

“I think I’m out,” Kendall says, from beside Gigi.

“No.” She feels despair, hot and ridiculous, pushing its way through her. “Don’t…”

“I’m not into them. You know I’m not. You are. That’s okay.” She smiles up at Gigi, and stretches, and God, the line of her body is something that Gigi wants to explore way past tonight. 

“Gi,” Zayn says again, his voice quieter, “if you don’t want to, if you two… that’s okay, that’s…”

“I do,” she says, as she looks over at the two of them. It’s reaffirmed then, because she does, she sees them together and she thinks, _Yes_. It feels like maybe for them, for the three of them, there’s just tonight, like this is all there is, like time is slipping away through her fingers and she’ll never get this back. She’ll never get Zayn back. She’ll never get them. That’s okay. It’ll have to be okay. 

Kendall unfolds herself from the couch. She picks up her sweater and her jeans, and reaches down to touch Gigi’s hair before kissing her on the forehead. “I’ll see you later?” she asks, like she needs the answer more than she wants to let on.

“Of course,” Gigi says, and touches Kendall’s fingers just as she pulls away. 

The door draws shut behind her, and in front of Gigi Harry says, “Well. Let’s get this sex show on the road. This would have made an excellent next tour, Zayn, you shouldn’t have left the band.”

“Yeah, it was a massive error,” Zayn agrees, and laughs. They both laugh, like they find each other stupidly endearing. Gigi finds them both mostly stupid. “Niall would have loved it,” Zayn says, and then they laugh even more. It is kind of sweet, she guesses. She imagines seeing Kendall again after nine months apart, and she has to admit that they’d probably be pretty gross and adorable if that happened. These boys have longer years of history than that and for a long time there was nothing there. It’s sad. It probably sucked. She’s okay with giving them a little time to reconnect.

It doesn’t take long before Zayn’s eyes are on her again, almost feral in the way he looks over her body. “What do you want, babe?”

“I mean.” She thinks about it hard, and then smiles at the pair of them slowly. “I don’t want one in the ass and one in the vag, if that’s what you mean. And I always think spitroasting is kind of undignified.”

Harry laughs again, so much so that his boner actually dips its head a little. Zayn throws a look at him that’s half unimpressed and half terribly charmed, which Gigi is starting to get the feeling sums up most of their relationship. Then Zayn says, “You told me you wanted to watch me getting fucked.”

“Oh really?” Harry raises an eyebrow. “That could be arranged.”

“She wanted to watch me sucking dick too,” Zayn tells Harry, pushing their shoulders together.

“Yeah?” Harry reaches up to run a hand through Zayn’s hair. “Well, you’re good at it.”

“Thanks, babe.” Zayn preens, like a cat in the sun. 

“You want to give me a hand?” Harry asks, looking at Gigi. “I mean, multitasking is a good thing.”

“I’ve heard the same thing,” Gigi agrees. Her heart’s thudding hard in her chest and she thinks she can feel her pulse thudding in her neck and wrists. The insides of her thighs are slick and when she reaches up to push her hair back she can smell Kendall on her hands. She likes that, but she isn’t sure if she should. She doesn’t know if any of this is a good idea, but she feels like no one can ever totally predict a disaster. She might as well just walk right into the eye of the storm. The worst is done, the most important relationship to her is already fucked with. Kendall’s already somewhere else in the house, probably thinking about how horrible and awkward and amateurish Gigi is at fingering. Maybe she’s making herself a sandwich in Zayn’s excellent kitchen and wishing she’d been scissoring with Selena or something else instead tonight. What’s done is done. All she has left are two gorgeous boys with beautiful dicks and a predilection for sucking each other off.

She has absolutely nothing to lose.

“So,” she says. “What do you want me to do?”

Harry shifts back on Zayn’s sofa, so his back is against the pillows. “On your knees, then, make Gigi proud,” he says to Zayn lightly, and he just does it, eyes on Harry’s face like he’s done this a million times before. He dips his head and she sees him mouth at the head of Harry’s cock, one hand curled on his thigh, the other on the base. He moves his head down and Gigi sees his stubbled cheeks hollow as he sucks, sees his long lashes flutter as he closes his eyes. Harry curls over just a little, touching Zayn’s head like a benediction. “Fuck,” he says, “I forgot,” and Gigi hears Zayn almost laugh around Harry’s dick. She knows what that feels like, kind of, because he once did it when he was going down on her, his stubble prickling her thighs, the hum and vibration of his laughter against her. There should always be joy in sex. She believes in that for sure. 

Harry digs down between the couch cushions and finds a small bottle, which he passes to Gigi. “He likes one finger to start with,” he says, like it’s a totally fucking normal conversation to be having, “but you can work your way up to three pretty quickly. We never got to four. He was always too anxious to get fucked.” There’s a smile curling on the corners of his mouth and Gigi can see Zayn’s hand tight on his thigh, white crescents around his fingertips, head bobbing. He’s taking in more of Harry’s cock than she assumed he would be able to. _Practice makes perfect_ , she thinks, and wonders about all the nights they spent doing shit almost exactly like this. The thought of it, of Zayn begging for that, of Harry with his fingers inside him and Zayn desperate for more – Jesus. That makes want flood through her whole body, from the bottom to the top.

She slicks up her fingers, taking a moment to thank God that today her nails are short and real, and lets her fingertips dance over the base of Zayn’s back, the dimples at the bottom of his spine. His skin is smooth warm gold and the tattoo on the nape of his neck is oddly beautiful and delicate in this light. In all lights, probably. She never got the chance to look at it properly. She’s glad she has tonight. He arches his back like he’s asking her to get on with it and Harry lets out a breath and Gigi skirts around Zayn’s hole with her fingertip. It’s warm and puckered and it isn’t gross like she half thought it might be, not even when she slips her fingertip inside him. There’s a ring of muscle there that kind of protests, but she perseveres, because she’s a champ and a winner. He’s tighter than Kendall was, which is obvious and makes sense. It’s probably a little weird that she’s had her fingers inside both someone else’s vagina and an asshole for the first time in the last few minutes, but her whole life is weird, so she’s going to go ahead and roll with it. The way Zayn pushes his hips back at her is hot and the way that he leans down further over Harry’s cock is hot as well, Harry’s fingers flexing in Zayn’s hair and on the back of his neck, rubbing over his shoulders. “Two fingers,” Harry tells Gigi, and so she presses in a second one, slow and steady. She can see how tense Zayn’s spine is and she runs her other hand along it, because she can’t quite tell if it’s pain or pleasure. “Are you into this?” she asks him, and Harry says, “He is,” and Zayn makes an affirmative noise around Harry’s cock as Gigi pushes in another finger.

“Curl your fingers towards you,” Harry says, and Gigi does. There’s part of her that’s still afraid to hurt Zayn but most of her can tell that he can absolutely handle more than her fingers, so she does it, and he gasps through his nose, and she reaches around and wraps her other hand around his cock, jerks him off once, twice, and then he’s coming hot and hard into her hand, mouth still on Harry’s cock. 

He lifts his head and looks over his shoulder at her with a stupid smile that makes her whole heart warm, and says, “Babe.”

She laughs, and pulls her fingers out of him. Her other hand is sticky with his come. So is the side of his couch, probably, or Harry’s leg, but that isn’t her problem. She licks off her fingers, and Harry says, “Hey,” and grabs her wrist to lick across her sticky palm. “I missed this. The way he tastes.”

“You dirty fuck,” Zayn says. He’s messy-haired and pink-cheeked and smiling brightly and he looks like someone took all the night and its stars and put them into his eyes. She glances at Harry, who’s warm and golden even though it’s December. Yeah. The sun and the moon, just like that poet said. Gigi gets that now. 

There’s a moment between the three of them. Harry smiles at her and she smiles at Zayn and Zayn smiles like he can’t help himself, like he’s happier than she ever made him before, and then he turns, drops onto his hands and knees. “Give him that lube,” he says to Gigi and she does. Harry kneels behind Zayn; his dick is so hard she feels like he’s probably almost in pain, but hurting from a boner is probably just something that high school assholes made up once upon a time to get young girls into bed. She’s glad it never worked on her. “Gi,” Zayn says, “on the coffee table.”

It takes her a moment to figure out what he wants from her, but then it’s so blissful, so perfect, so sweet. She sits on the edge of the coffee table and opens her legs, and can’t stop herself from laughing when Harry says, studious and sincere, “You’re gorgeous down there.”

“Thank you,” she tells him, feeling like she won something, and then he slides slowly into Zayn and her breath is taken totally, totally away. The way they move together. God, the way they move. The way Zayn shifts and arches to meet him and the way Harry presses into him, the way his fingers are hard on Zayn’s hips in the way they have to be. It isn’t about possession, it’s about togetherness and the way that they take that togetherness in the way that fits best for them. Part of her always assumed that two guys banging had to be about a guy and a girl, that they had to take roles somehow, but that isn’t the case here and she feels like a stupid asshole for even making that assumption. It’s just pleasure. It’s just physicality. It’s just bodies and the way they fit together and the bliss in Zayn’s eyes, his slightly open mouth, his red bottom lip. He looks at her and smiles and says “Come on, then.”

She shifts forward and he presses his face between her legs. This is familiar, this is normal. This is the sea shift of Harry fucking into him and Zayn moving with that, taking that rhythm and pushing it into her with his tongue and his mouth. He can’t use his hands but that’s okay, she can help him with that, she can help these waves of pleasure breaking over her like she’s the beach on a clear hot day and Zayn is the ocean and Harry is the bright blue sky above. He licks into her deep and thoroughly and she looks at the way Harry’s focusing harder on Zayn now, the way he’s moving faster and fucking into him harder. Gigi feels Zayn moan against her, delicious vibrations that extend out into her limbs and her belly and down to her toes. “Harry, he wants you to fuck him harder,” she says, breathless, and Zayn hums his approval against her cunt. She can feel his mouth on her clit, hard and messy, and it’s too much, it’s too much, and then Harry’s gasping and coming hard into Zayn. He holds himself there, threads of muscle hard on his forearms, before pulling out. In a fluid motion – or maybe it isn’t fluid, maybe it just seems that way because Gigi’s drunk on sex and the two of them and her sort of boyfriend and his perfect mouth – Zayn pulls her forward and she slides down onto his cock. The fullness is even more, the fullness is too much, and then there’s Harry behind her, his already familiar scent, his hands on her, his mouth on her neck, his hand on her tit, his other hand finding her clit somehow, Zayn’s hand joining his, the two of them together on and around and inside her, coaxing her orgasm out of her. It’s like stepping off a cliff edge into a hurtling drop, it’s a near black out, it’s like the world has rearranged itself and fragmented apart before throwing itself back together again. Zayn thrusts into her a couple more times as she gasps, hands on his chest, reeling through the comedown. She feels him come inside her, feels his arms around her and Harry’s arms around the two of them, their hearts pounding together, someone’s tears wet on her face. She doesn’t think she’s ever felt safer in her whole life before. _I love you_ , she thinks, _I love you, I love you_ , and does not know who she’s thinking of.

*

Afterwards they pretend that nothing’s different. She pads through the house to find Kendall asleep in the den, wrapped in a furry black throw, all bare legs and that sweater slipping off her shoulder. She leaves her in there and curls up on Zayn’s couch between him and Harry, with _The Office_ reruns on TV. “The British version’s better,” Harry says, getting up to go in search of snacks, and Zayn says, eyes on the TV and his hand curled around Gigi’s leg, “Fuck off.”

Harry laughs, easy and happy, and returns a few minutes later with a couple bags of chips and a big purple bag of chocolate buttons. “Cadbury’s!” Gigi says. “Give that to me.” She holds out her hands bossily until Harry rolls his eyes, smiling, and hands them over. 

“My mum sent me those,” Zayn says, and Gigi offers one to him first before she puts one onto her tongue and lets it melt, slow and sweet. Her eyelids are starting to droop and her body’s starting to ache. She feels a little sticky and a little disgusting, and lying under a fake fur throw on Zayn’s couch between two other equally sticky and disgusting people isn’t really helping that. 

It’s like Zayn reads her mind, because he starts making quiet dissatisfied noises and shifting around and then he mutters, “I need a shower.” He staggers to his feet and runs a hand through his hair and smiles sleepily back at the two of them before he heads for the stairs. 

Next to Gigi, Harry offers her a polite, hopeful smile. “I should go too,” she says. “I’m disgusting. But I’m also lazy, so here we are.”

“Here we are,” he agrees. “I don’t think you’re disgusting.”

“You don’t have spunk on your thighs,” she points out.

“That’s true, but I am absolutely covered in lube,” Harry says cheerfully. He pulls her into his side then, his arm around her shoulders. On screen, Michael Scott has become Prison Mike. It’s a beautiful transformation. 

“He reminds me of you,” Gigi says, just to be an asshole, and Harry laughs. It’s easy to let her mind wander then, past the two of them, and into the quiet beyond the TV set, beyond Dwight saying crazy things and Pam and Jim’s heartfelt, quiet glances at each other. “Me and Kendall watched _The Great British Bake Off_ ,” she says.

“I love that programme!” Harry says, with deep and apparently sincere enthusiasm. “I need to follow Nadiya on Twitter. I want to be her friend but I don’t know how to do that without stalking her until she calls the police.”

“You could date Tamal,” Gigi suggests.

Harry laughs, but there’s something a little sad there. Defeated, almost. “Dating doesn’t work very well for me. A couple of months is my tops, and even then it isn’t really fair on whoever I’m going out with. I’m just too… it’s been too complicated. My head’s been in such a weird place for so long. Tamal deserves better than that.”

“Right,” Gigi says, looking down at his arm slung casually across her chest. There are so many things she doesn’t want to think about right now. Harry’s sadness and inability to have a good relationship for reasons she’s fairly certain of is maybe top of that list. “I like your mermaid tattoo. Why does she have pubes? I didn’t know mermaids had crotches.”

“Because she does,” Harry says, as though that’s an acceptable answer, which it absolutely is not.

“Admit it, you just wanted a sexy mermaid,” Gigi says.

“I did,” Harry agrees, and she laughs and strokes his arm. His skin is warm, like he carries gentleness and heat around with him, like he’s a human size hot water bottle. She thinks that Harry might be a pretty good thing to hug every time she has cramps. After a moment he says, “So, you and Kendall.”

“Ugh.” She sighs. “My mom would kill me. Her mom would kill her.”

“But maybe you’d be happy together,” he suggests, and then after a moment: “And I can’t see Kris being all that upset about their TV programme getting better ratings because of you and Kendall.”

“Jesus.” Her head’s spinning. “Stop it.”

“I’m just saying.”

“I mean, you have a point,” she admits, trying not to sound like a sulky brat.

“Mums are just there to love you and support you,” Harry says. He’s starting to sound like an annoying sanctimonious little prick. Maybe the reason he can’t hold down a relationship is actually that he’s extremely irritating. “That’s what they do.”

Gigi twitches out of his grip and away from his chest and away from the pubetacular mermaid on his arm. “It sounds super nice to be the sort of person who has the luxury of knowing their mom loves them no matter what. Me and Kendall, it isn’t quite like that.”

“Your mum would love you—”

“Maybe! But she might not like me for a while! My career’s going well but it literally _just_ took off.”

“There’s Cara…”

“Cara’s English and quirky. And she’s an actress now. I am the opposite of quirk.”

“I don’t know.” He smiles down at her, lopsided and sweet. “You seem quite quirky to me.”

She doesn’t know if that’s a compliment or not, so she just narrows her eyes at him. After a moment he says, “So Zayn’s okay these days, is he?”

“Yeah,” she says, because he is, as far as she can tell, or he is most of the time, anyway. “Did he seem okay to you?”

“He seemed more okay than he has done in years,” Harry says, immediate and honest. “It’s nice to have this Zayn back.”

 _I don’t know if **you** have him back_ , Gigi wants to say, but it’s probably best not to be an asshole right now. Instead she says, “What happened with you guys, anyway?”

Harry lets out a breath. “Do you want the long or the short story?”

“Short,” Gigi says, because she doesn’t particularly want her heart to be broken with a sad tale of other people’s romantic ineptitude and inability to be happy tonight.

“Basically,” Harry says, “we were on and off and for a while he liked me and then he was cross with me because I was shit but by then I liked him, so much you have no idea, and then we – I think neither of us wanted each other, we were just cross, but we kept on… you know, anyway. And he got engaged and even then…”

“Cheater, cheater,” Gigi says softly.

“I know.” Harry looks down at his hands. “I do regret that, you know.”

“It’s okay.” She touches the side of his face and he presses his cheek clumsily against her hand. She pokes his dimple gently and he sighs out a soft laugh. And then, after a moment, the question that’s been on her mind for hours, since she saw the way they look at each other, the want there, the affection: “Why didn’t you get him to stay?”

“By the time we realised, he was already gone.” The words are almost a whisper, almost a shadow, almost a dream. “He told us he was going a million times before he left in hundreds of different ways and we didn’t believe him. We didn’t look quite hard enough.” 

He bites his lip and she lets the quiet hang there, lets the moment breathe between them. God, it’s sad. Five years, gone like that. Louis mad at everyone on the other side of the world and Liam and Niall uncertain and Harry – she doesn’t even know what Harry is. A mess, mostly. “I can’t believe I was surprised in the end,” Harry says. “None of us actually thought he’d do it but then we looked back and all the signs were there. It made sense. But it was shit. It was really shit. And the thing about Zayn is that… it isn’t even that he burns his bridges, right. It’s more like…” He thinks, and then he smiles a little. “It’s like he half-destroys them, and he leaves a horrible mess behind him, and he expects you to follow him anyway. And sometimes you just can’t, because there’s no path, or it’s too dangerous, and then he’s angry that you aren’t there with him.”

He looks at her then, like he’s willing her to understand, and she does, almost. It’s just that it’s sad, and it sucks, and she thinks she’d probably follow Kendall into space if she asked her to go. But the difference there is that Kendall would ask her, while it seems like Zayn just expected it from people. She always knew he had some huge terrible communication problems. Finally Harry says, “I really miss him. I miss all of them since we went on break. But I’ve been missing him for _years_.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, heartfelt, and he smiles, small and sad, and says, “It’s okay.”

They watch TV then in silence, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. Five minutes later Zayn lopes downstairs, fragrant and freshly washed in his favourite sweatpants and Rolling Stones shirt, his hair dripping a little. He crawls onto the couch beside Harry, and Gigi decides it’s probably time to take her leave. She wants a shower and she wants a bed, and she wants to stretch out her aching limbs between fresh cool sheets, and she wants sleep. More than anything, she wants Kendall. She kisses each boy on the cheek just once and climbs off the couch, and pads barefoot to the den. Kendall’s still there asleep, her dark hair streaming around her pale face, and Gigi says, “K? Kendall?” softly, touching her cheek.

She wakes up gradually and then with a start, eyes focusing on Gigi’s face, cracking a tiny yawn. “Oh,” she says, rolling out of her furry blanket and to her feet. “What’s happening? Are you good? I think you have a hickie.”

“Really?” Gigi touches her neck. “Shit.”

“Did you have fun?” Kendall ventures.

“Yeah,” Gigi says honestly. “I mean, I don’t know if I’d do it again with them. But yeah, it was fun.” She bites her lip. “Did you?”

“Yeah,” Kendall says, bright and instant, and Gigi feels warm and satisfied at that. “I feel gross, though. My neck hurts from that couch. You think Zayn would mind if I slept over?”

“Hell no,” Gigi says. “I’ll race you upstairs.”

“What?” Kendall says, and frowns, and then takes off as fast as her legs will carry her. They sprint and laugh their way to the top of Zayn’s stairs and Kendall beats her down the hallway to an open bedroom, all white sheets and stark white walls. “I won!” she crows, and leans, breathless and laughing, against the wall. On the other side of the room the bed looks so fucking inviting, all crisp sheets and fresh pillows. 

“Actually, you lose. I wanted to race to the bathroom,” Gigi says. Her heart flips in her chest but she tries her best to look cool as she says, “I thought you might want to take a shower with me.”

Kendall’s eyes widen a little, and then she says, “Yeah. I mean… yeah. Of course.”

The water is warm and there’s just enough space for two people in there. They wash each other’s hair and Gigi gets soap in Kendall’s eyes and to her credit, she only complains a little about it. And then they kiss, and Kendall touches Gigi’s body like her fingers are whispers, like she can barely believe she’s getting to do it. _Of course you can_ , Gigi wants to say to her. _I’ll always want you_. Afterwards they towel dry their hair and Kendall runs her fingers through Gigi’s and braids it tightly in front of the bathroom mirror. They smile at their reflections in the fogged up mirror and Gigi reaches out to draw a heart in the mist. “You’re blushing,” she tells Kendall, which she is, and Kendall flicks water at her face.

*

In the morning Gigi wakes up early, which is probably for the best since Harry is apparently set to leave at the asscrack of dawn and she feels like it’s probably good manners to say goodbye to your threesome buddies the morning after. She wanders downstairs in her towel from the previous night and a pair of Zayn’s old but clean sports socks – which are stupid because as if he does any sports when that’s time that he could use to pet dogs and think about existentialism – and goes into the kitchen to switch on the coffee maker. The house is still and silent and she figures that maybe Zayn and Harry are upstairs in Zayn’s room. She feels like maybe that’s something she should be jealous of but instead there’s nothing, a void of emptiness in her heart where that jealousy maybe used to live. Maybe last night changed that. Maybe last night changed a lot of things.

She moves through the still house and opens blinds to the still-dim world outside. It’s sad for Zayn that Harry has to leave today. She thinks that maybe they could have done with a little more time to figure themselves out, to decide what exactly they mean to each other, if the fact they used to hook up might mean something for their future. She feels like her situation with Kendall might just be easier. She hopes so, anyway.

The living room is almost the last room that she goes into downstairs. Her mind is elsewhere, back in bed with Kendall upstairs, next to her still sleeping face and her long warm limbs. Maybe she could get them some tea and go back upstairs, curl up next to her and wake her up with kisses. Maybe they could spend the day trading kisses back and forth and figuring out what this whole thing is, if it’s anything at all. 

She cracks the door open and for some reason she isn’t surprised by what she sees there. It’s Zayn and Harry, which is inevitable somehow; the two of them together, as close as any two human beings could be, Zayn on top and getting fucked, moving slow and sweet, his hand in Harry’s hair, their arms tight around each other, Harry’s face pressed into his neck. They look close, so close, like two human beings could never get any closer. Gigi watches as Zayn murmurs something into Harry’s ear, their cheekbones pressed tight together, and she watches as they kiss too, as Harry murmurs something back, as they kiss again, like they have all the time in the world even though the clock is ticking down and Harry has to leave soon. It’s private, the way they are together right now, nothing like last night. The way they would have been years ago, when there were no girls and there was no alcohol: just the two of them together, moving like their bodies were designed for each other’s, like sometime years and years ago their life together was written in the stars.

It hits her like a thunderbolt, so obvious and pure that she doesn’t know why she didn’t think it before. _Oh. They loved each other. And they still do._

The sun and the moon, never out at the same time, destined never to meet. But those afternoons, when the sky is bright and cold and blue, and the sun is dazzling, and the moon aches itself white and naked into the sky, unexpected and beautiful in its strangeness. God, those afternoons, Gigi feels like anything could happen. Maybe these stupid, sweet boys could have their happy ending after all. Slowly, as quiet as a shadow, she pads back upstairs, and crawls back into bed and into Kendall’s sleeping arms.

*

Zayn wakes the two of them, a little after seven. He drums his fingertips lightly on the door and then looks inside. “Harry’s leaving,” he says quietly, and smiles, although there isn’t much happiness in his eyes. There’s something different about him today, something more removed. This time yesterday Gigi feels like she could have taken hold of him any time she wanted, ruffled his hair, kissed his lips. He isn’t hers any more. That’s okay, she doesn’t mind. He probably never was. She doesn’t think she ever wanted him to be.

“Oh.” Kendall yawns and rolls over to look at her phone. Her eyes are bleary and her face is pale but she gets out of bed anyway. “You know, I should go.” She looks around and picks up her sweatshirt from the ground. “I know it’s early, but…”

“Right.” Zayn looks nonplussed. “You know, you two can stay here as long as you want—”

“I should really go,” Kendall says. Zayn raises an eyebrow at Gigi behind her back. _I don’t know_ , she tries to say with her eyes, her stomach plunging unpleasantly, and Zayn shrugs.

Downstairs Harry’s standing in the hallway, smelling freshly showered and clean, wearing one of Zayn’s shirts, the black one with the hole on the neckline, the old soft one. It fits Harry better than it fit Zayn and Gigi wonders suddenly if he’s reclaiming property that was stolen years ago.

“It was so good to see you,” Kendall says, falling into Harry’s arms to hug him. “Text me next time you’re in LA, okay? When will that be?”

Harry sneaks a glance at Zayn that he probably thinks is totally subtle. It isn’t. “I don’t know,” he says. “Soon, probably.”

“Good. Call me,” she says. Gigi slips forward for a hug too, smiles up at Harry, wishes him a safe trip. He’s smiling down at her, like some of the affection he has for Zayn and Kendall has transferred to her too. That’s good. She feels like Harry might be a good person to call a friend.

They go outside together, into the hazy morning light. The sky is grey but light is breaking through, stubborn and certain like the weeds pushing their way through the cracks in the underfoot paving slabs. Zayn’s gates are open so the car Harry called can arrive easily and Kendall stands next to Gigi as they wait for it, with her arms wrapped around herself and goosebumps prickling on her bare shoulder. The driveway is cold under Gigi’s feet, and Zayn’s sweatpants that she stole from his room are too big for her, rolled over at the waist. The space between them has never been greater, not even when they first met and didn’t know each other, not even when they accidentally met each other at castings they were both desperate to get. Despair and loss and regret, far bleaker than the grey clouds overhead, is starting to push itself through every cell in Gigi’s body.

At the end of Zayn’s driveway he and Harry are kissing, desperate and slow, as though they know it’s their last chance. Behind them the almost-risen sun has broken free of the clouds and is blazing low and orange in the sky. Gigi wants to mutter something to Kendall about them being gross but she doesn’t feel like now is the right time. It feels like something has broken permanently, like last night changed them all. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be the same again.

The car comes, sneaking sleek and black through Zayn’s gates. When the boys see it they stop kissing and wrap their arms around each other instead. Holding each other for the brief time that they’re allowed, before Harry has to leave and Zayn has to find his life again. Being in love must suck. Gigi doesn’t know if she ever wants to try it.

Harry turns to the two of them and raises a hand in farewell. They wave back, irritatingly in unison. Zayn grabs Harry’s shoulder then, pulls him back and kisses him one last time, his hands on the side of Harry’s face. He murmurs something. Kisses him again. _I love you_ , Gigi wonders. _I’m sorry. I missed you. Come back to me. I’ll come back to you in the end, I promise._ All of the above, probably, wrapped up in a simple “I’ll call you.”

Harry slides into the car and closes the door behind himself, and it starts moving, and just like that, he’s gone. Beside her Kendall turns and goes back into the house. Zayn wanders up the driveway towards her like an old man, his hands in his pockets, his ugly sliders on his feet along with horrible grey socks, the corners of his mouth downturned like he’s trying not to cry. “Hey,” he tells her. “There’s – there’s some stuff I need to do today.” The words _So you need to go the fuck home_ afterwards are unspoken but they’re absolutely there.

She raises a quizzical eyebrow, meaning _Are you going to sit alone in your house feeling sad_ , but he just sighs and says, “I’m going to go to the studio.”

“I thought your album was done.”

“It is, mostly.” He rubs his hands over his face exhaustedly, and then he smiles, sweeter now. “But there’s always space for one more song.”

“Are you going to write about me?” she asks, even though she knows he won’t, and he laughs, and slings an arm around her shoulders, and leads her gently inside.

*

The next few days are weirdly normal. Gigi has dinner with her mom and they decide that they’re all going to spend Christmas in Aspen, which suits her just fine. There’s nothing like a couple black diamond runs to shake off boys and girls who she should probably have never had sex with. She half considers telling her mom about Kendall, about the fact that there might be a few girls in her future, but her mom is tired by the end of dinner, so there isn’t much point. She’s kind though, like she always is, and on the drive home she touches the side of Gigi’s face and says, “Sometimes I think I don’t tell you how much I love you often enough.” Gigi thinks she might have underestimated her.

She talks to Kendall a little, mostly via text, about shit like Kendall’s dog pooping on the couch and what colour wood Gigi should get for her new floors and whether skiing is better than snowboarding. They do not talk about kissing. They do not talk about showering together. They especially do not talk about having group sex with each other and two former members of One Direction.

Zayn went back to England last night, which was okay. She went over to his house to help him pack up his stuff because he sucks at that, and he seemed kind of quiet and subdued, which she figured was probably normal. He didn’t seem sad, which she thinks is probably the most important thing. It’s probably exciting having part of his old life opening up for him again. Being loved back seems like it would be pretty fucking awesome. “I’ll see you when I get back,” he told her at his front door, his cab right there waiting for him, and leaned in to kiss her, clumsier than they used to be somehow, and she told him “Okay,” and didn’t really believe him. He’s been texting her the whole time since then though, pictures of his little sisters and his dogs and his Christmas tree, so honestly, who knows. She’d like to see him again. She’d like to believe that they have some kind of future, no matter what it is. 

It’s when she’s packing for Aspen early one morning, a few days before Christmas, that her phone rings. “Are you still in LA?” Kendall asks as soon as she picks up, sounding kind of weird.

“Yeah. I mean, we’re leaving late tonight for Aspen, but I’m here right now.” Her half-packed suitcases are sprawled everywhere. Owning this many pairs of ski pants seems somehow remiss. She straightens up from hunting through her underwear drawer for sports bras and asks, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Well, I guess so. Just Kylie was supposed to come over today and help me decorate my Christmas tree, but she bailed again. So.” Kendall’s voice is tight, like she’s barely holding back tears. “I was wondering if you wanted to come over.”

“What, like your sister substitute?” A month ago, a week ago, a few days ago, that probably wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world. Right now the thought of it makes Gigi want to throw up.

“No!” Kendall says. “No. God. As my best friend.”

That’ll do. Gigi thinks that might just be enough. “Okay,” she says. “But I mean, I’m not having any of that classy shit. If it’s all gold ornaments I’m bailing.”

“It’s gold and red.” Kendall sounds like she’s smiling a little now. “Is that enough?”

“I think so,” Gigi says. “Okay, babe. I’ll see you soon.” _Babe_ , she thinks, as she puts her phone down. Just coming out of her mouth, not even intended. That’s a new one.

*

When Kendall opens the door she’s wearing a Santa hat and sweats and a slightly embarrassed smile. “Merry Christmas!” she says. From behind her, there’s the waft of Christmas cookies and—

“Is that apple cider?” Gigi asks, dropping her bag and jacket on the floor and toeing off her shoes. “Oh my God.”

“Yeah!” Kendall says, going pink. “I just thought, you know. It would be nice.”

“It is nice,” Gigi says. She twists her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck and lets it spring back into place, a little wild. She really needs to deknot that shit sometime soon. She tries to focus, tries to focus on Kendall and her heart shaped face and her dark eyes and her hopeful smile. She needs to do something now. Draw a fucking line. “Let me get one thing straight,” she says. “I don’t want to do anything today that you would have done with your sister, okay?” 

Kendall’s eyes bulge and then she snorts out a laugh. It makes her ugly for a moment, and Gigi loves her for it, helplessly, stupidly, her whole heart filling up with it. “Come here,” Kendall says, and grabs Gigi’s hands and pulls her under a doorway.

“This is nice,” Gigi says. “I love doors, how did you know?”

“Look up, asshole,” Kendall says.

Gigi does, and then she feels herself melt. Kendall’s holding her hands, which is lucky, because they’re the only things keeping her upright. “Mistletoe,” she says.

“Mistletoe,” Kendall confirms. Her voice is warm and the soft look in her eyes is like a caress. “Harry told me it would be a good idea.”

“That little Casanova,” Gigi says, her throat tight in the best way. 

“Zayn’s safe there,” Kendall says, squeezing Gigi’s hands. “I think they’re gonna make it.”

“I’m worried about him,” Gigi admits.

“I know.” Kendall frowns concernedly. “I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be. I mean, I never loved him. It just takes a little adjusting.” She looks up at the mistletoe and feels herself smile. She can smell fresh pine too, and the Chanel that Kendall wears, and her coconut shampoo, and the apple cider. “A little adjusting and a lot of…”

“Wait,” Kendall says, stopping Gigi right in the middle of her request to make out. Then she vanishes down a hallway, which is unexpected. 

“Okay,” Gigi says to no one. 

Then Kendall reappears, holding a second Santa hat. “I got one for you too.”

“I can’t believe my best friend’s such a weird Christmas freak,” Gigi says, and puts the hat on anyway, pulling it right down to the bridge of her nose and peering at Kendall from underneath it and scrunching up her face. “Am I pretty?”

“So pretty.” Kendall pushes the Santa hat back, letting her fingertips dance over Gigi’s neck, cheekbone, her temple. “So, so pretty. And kind, too. And smart. And so fucking funny. I’m so sorry. I freaked out. I needed a couple days.”

“Oh.” Gigi feels like the bottom of her stomach’s about to drop out, like she’s skating on thin ice, like she might be about to take off and fly. “That’s okay,” she says, and then Kendall leans in to kiss her, sweet and tentative, and Gigi kisses her back harder, pushing her against the doorframe and making her squeak into Gigi’s mouth. She laughs then; they both laugh, and kiss again, and Gigi puts her arms around Kendall’s neck and touches her silky hair and the smooth skin on the nape of her neck. She doesn’t know how Zayn and Harry survived for years, being in love and being uncertain and not getting to have each other and making each other unhappy instead. Gigi’s determined to be happy forever. She’s determined to make Kendall happy too. She breaks away and murmurs, “I got you something for your tree.”

“Yeah?” Kendall raises her eyebrows.

“Yeah.” Gigi retrieves her bag and fishes a smaller paper bag out of it. “I guess it’s two somethings.”

Kendall turns them over in her hands. Her eyes are glistening. “If you cry I’m going to kill you,” Gigi tells her, feeling like she might also be about to cry.

“I’m not going to cry,” Kendall says firmly, but her eyes are shining a little more than usual. Starlight. This is fireworks, right here. _She’s the moon and I’m the sun_ , Gigi thinks vaguely, as Kendall moves over to her bare green tree and puts the two decorations together side by side: two little angels, one blonde, one brown-haired, both of them just a little bit magical. Gigi reaches forward and twists their arms gently so their hands are joined together. “Perfect,” Kendall murmurs, and actually, it kind of is.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading this! Any comments would be very much appreciated.


End file.
